The People Crafting US Policy Aren't In America https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-people-crafting-u-s-policy-are... Authored by Joseph Solis-Mullen via The Libertarian Institute/Mises.org, In a piece of news that shocked the mainstream media, but which shocked no one familiar with the academic industry writ large, retired US Army general John Allen was forced to resign as president of the Brookings Institution after it was revealed the FBI was investigating him for lobbying on behalf of the Qatari monarchy. Of course, the real news, scarcely noted by The Washington Post, New York Times, or any other purported paper of record, is that Allen was only really in trouble because he hadn’t fulfilled the pro forma legal requirements for those lobbying the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign agent or government. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), under which such activities are regulated, includes several exceptions that allow for such activities without declaring a conflict of interest. Think tanks, a misnomer if ever there was one, operate under an "academic exception" that allows for engagement in "bona fide religious, scholastic, academic, or scientific pursuits or the fine arts." Anyone who has ever picked up one of the many deadly dull social science journals where actual, bona fide empirical academic work is done knows this constitutes perhaps a fraction of what think tanks almost daily churn out. Rather think tank commentary, touted as objective analysis, is regularly featured or cited by publications and outlets as apparently diverse as The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Ukraine has stepped up pleas for U.S. fighter jets, as two of the country’s top pilots left combat with Russia to lobby Washington, D.C. lawmakers.https://t.co/6mAmltCpo0 — FLYING Magazine (@FlyingMagazine) June 27, 2022 Of course, think tanks are hardly alone. As Ben Freeman, a specialist on foreign influence on U.S. policy, has documented, such democratic bastions of liberal values as the UAE and Saudi Arabia donate hundreds of millions, even billions, to universities around the country. Of course, from a libertarian perspective, who is to say who should be giving money to whom and for what? Further, FARA’s provisions are so nebulous that virtually anyone could be targeted for virtually any reason, an obvious opportunity for unaccountable federal officials to impinge on Americans’ civil liberties. But the blatant hypocrisy of it all is what really stands out, as the same universities and think tanks regularly decry the apparently perfidious influence of countries like China, which they breathlessly warn uses our "open institutions" for its own gain. Should any of their number dare to go off message and report, for example, on the well-documented and wholly negative influence of countries like Israel on US foreign policy, they are tarred as anti-Semites, racists, or foreign agents themselves! The truth is the powerful Israel and Saudi Arabia lobbies have been able to steer US policy in directions clearly at odds with the best interests of the American people for decades. Unsurprisingly, perhaps nowhere has the deleterious effect of their money been more felt than in US policy toward Iran, with the Saudis, Israelis, and Emiratis dumping literally billions of dollars into attacks on a country the United States should have normalized relations with decades ago. The Uyghur lobby is another such interest group that enjoys an open door in Congress and the op-ed pages of prominent papers—this while its nakedly paramilitary arm advocates the violent overthrow of the Beijing government! And what are we, or foreign governments like China, to think when the parent organization of such extremists, the World Uyghur Congress, takes funding from the US government itself? We aren’t supposed to think about it at all. Just like we aren’t supposed to question any of the other nakedly self-serving policies. Who, for example, is surprised to learn there is a large and active Ukraine lobby in Washington? That has paid off handsomely, with our government now handing over $130 million daily to Kyiv with little to no oversight. And of course, most maddeningly, any critically thinking American who even dares to question the US government’s obviously dangerous and counterproductive policies, bought and paid for by literal foreign agents, are themselves accused of being in the pay of Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. Never mind that all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Again, the American people aren’t expected to think at all, only to stay in line and keep the money flowing. This is the sad state of foreign policy in America, and it happens right out in the open.

Here the US Tyrant State tries to spark a revolution via pissing off all those who live within it... San Francisco Couple Gets $1,500 Fine For Parking In Their Own Driveway Things really seem to be going "uphill" in San Francisco. A couple from the city, who has parked in the same spot "every day for the last 36 years" was ticketed $1,542 for parking in their own driveway this month. As many people do, the couple lives on a hill in a city where parking is always at a premium. The couple has been parking in the carpad in front of their house - which they say has been there since the house was built in 1910. But now the city planning department is saying it is "illegal to park in the front yard of a house" and threatened further tickets should the couple - Judy and Ed Craine - continue to park where they have been. "We always use the carport," Judy told ABC 7 San Francisco. "Parked in that driveway every day and every night," Ed added. "We got this email saying we can't park in the pad anymore. I said what, that's crazy." Judy continued: "It was very surprising, to say the least. I wrote them back saying I thought this was a mistake." But the city planning department confirmed the ticket. "And if we were found parking there again, it would be a $1,500 fine," Judy added. Ed asked: "Why are you taking away something that has great utility? To all of a sudden to be told you can't use something that we could use for years. It's, it's startling. Inexplicable." The city planning committee then made the couple prove that parking there was a historic use on the lot, so the couple started digging. "We could be grandfathered in. If we show them a historical photo that showed a car... or a horse-drawn buggy in the carport," Judy said. And the couple came up with a photo from 1938 which shows a car or buggy pulling into his driveway. But the planning department told them the photo was too fuzzy and that it couldn't be used as evidence. Today, their carpad sits empty and the couple is forced to park on the hill. "The onus is on us to prove we're innocent... though I don't feel guilty," Judy concluded.

Dear America, Happy Birthday, Kind Regards From The Brits https://grrrgraphics.com/happy-independence-day/ Here in the UK we should celebrate American Independence with more enthusiasm. After all, as MorningPorridge.com's Bill Blain explains, it was an absolute stroke of genius – on our part! Independence Day was the culmination of our great plan to improve the UK. It was brilliant for its time. Over centuries we’d come to realise the main issues in the UK were down to a whole host of conflicting demographic and people problems – which we easily solved by exporting them elsewhere. In the 1600s the new Britain (not yet the United Kingdom) emerged from millennia of mostly slaying each other: Britons against Saxons, Saxon against Angles, Angles against Scots, Scots against Picts, Everyone against Vikings, Scotland vs England, Britain against Spain, France and anyone else wanting to have a go, Religious Wars and Civil Wars. Suddenly, peace (of a sort) broke out. The aristocracy moved from damp draughty castles into nice modern stately homes. The peasantry moved from disease riven mud-hovels into brick-built boxes in new cities. People stopped dying of preventable diseases and a lack of soap, and the population began to boom. The UK is a small island, and we don’t really have the space. We wanted to avoid the kind of unpleasantness we’d seen generated by civil wars, rebellions and overly dangerous political and religious ideas – like levelling up or social equality, questioning the divine authority of kings, or further outbreaks of religious intolerance. Hence, we came up with the wizard wheeze of exporting all the useless pains-in-our-backsides to New World across the Atlantic. So: We got rid of surplus impoverished second, third and n+1 sons of the minor aristocracy (drones by any standard), and the middle classes by offering them land in the fertile south and shipping them off to found new agricultural estates. We winnowed the cities of surplus labour by offering “opportunity” in the new world – shipping them off to work the land, build the cities and direct the industry and commerce of the new provinces. We got rid of our religious nutters. The frankly dull, boring and mostly harmless ones dressed in black were shipped off to the new world and promised they could do whatever they wished in terms of their religion. They happily established themselves in New England and in typical Puritan style started burning old women as witches because the milk had gone sour. The more radical Catholic dissenters were shipped south. The Scottish/English borderers – who’d spent centuries raiding each other – were offered Northern Ireland, or if particularly violent, given land in the New World with added attraction of being able to fight the French to the West and North. And every time we experienced a national tragedy, like wars and clearances in Scotland, or famine in Ireland – there was plenty of space for the inconvenient survivors in the colonies. As the colonies grew, it was easy to persuade bright young folk that a lifetime spent paying back the costs of their economic migration was worthwhile. Brilliant. Britain’s population excess solved. We got rid of our unnecessary surplus, and foisted them off on the Americas.. which then had the absolute temerity to complain about being taxed by London. Ungrateful little tykes. Enough is enough. Despite the fact we’d help them get established and protected them from the marauding French, we had our second genius moment. Why pay for the America’s to be our national dumping ground…? Let them pay for themselves! So we engineered a rather lame revolution, helped them write a rather ironic constitution that befuddles them still to this day, persuaded them to sort themselves out by adopting ridiculous political structures, and left them to get on with it, confident, in time they’d see things our way and become an English Speaking bastion on the unfashionable side of the Atlantic.. Which from our perspective; has pretty much panned out as planned. But the fervid mix of hotheads, genetic misfits, bad ideas and even worse behaviours we shipped out do seem to be battering into each other rather appallingly these days.. With all that in mind, in an effort to be fair and balanced, we give the last few words to American artist Ben Garrison, who reminds us all that 'a house divided cannot stand', so "choose wisely"... The Fourth of July used to stand for all Americans coming together to celebrate our independence day from tyranny. Now, too many demand the return of the very same tyranny our forefathers rebelled against. We’ve been around long enough and seen enough independence days to notice that America is now more divided than ever. In our younger days we observed how Democrats and Republicans didn’t often agree with each other, but such disagreements were done with a certain modicum of class and mutual respect. Both parties placed the overall interests of America first. This is no longer the case. Biden said he was not a ’nationalist’ and he placed globalism above America’s interests. Biden does not want to make America great again. It’s why we’re seeing such high gas prices at the pumps. It’s why we’re involved in another war that does not serve our interests. Biden doesn’t want America to be energy independent. He wants the globalist’s ‘climate change’ agenda to be forced upon us regardless of the consequences. Biden doesn’t want to control the borders. He wants America overrun and its middle class destroyed. The Democrats want everyone dependent on Big Government. Under Obama and now Biden, the Democrats hate America outright. They especially hate what it once stood for—freedom and liberty. Patriots were called ‘bitter clingers’ by Obama. The anti-American ‘woke’ Democrats want statues that commemorate America’s history pulled down. They want ‘green’ energy, which means much higher gas prices. They want more crime and wide open borders, an endless war a half a world away, abortion on demand, and even the end the very family structure itself. They are blurring and destroying the very definition of what men and women are, the Democrats have shown that they are anti-human. They urge women to get abortions in order to stay in the corporate workplace. This is anti-family. Many ‘RINO’ Republicans work with the Democrats, but overall the two parties are more divided than ever. We don’t see much changing that would remedy this situation. Our country is not going to come together again. The Democrats continue to impeach and impugn their arch-enemy, Trump, even though he’s not in office. They’ve resorted to the crassest lies to ensure he doesn’t run again and if they keep stealing elections, real fireworks will eventually begin. Our forefathers objected to taxation without representation and we must do the same if our Constitution is ignored while tyranny, criminality, and corruption run rampant among those who would rule us. With this is mind, cherish your families and this Independence Day weekend, don’t let it be your last.

The Physics Of Freedom https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/07/11/the_physics_of_freedom... Authored by J. Peder Zane Freedom is our Founding Fathers’ greatest gift. https://constructal.org/ https://mems.duke.edu/about/news/freedom-and-evolution-hierarchy-nature-soci... https://www.wsj.com/articles/physics-biology-and-economic-inequality-1154906... Since 1776, that single word has been the compass and measure of the human experiment the world calls America. Whatever disparate, sometimes far-flung ideologies they may embrace, all who celebrate or bemoan our past, present, and future ground their claims and critiques in that single word. At heart, we are ever asking: How free are we? When you imagine all the other ideas those men in powdered wigs might have made our identity and obsession, freedom – which feels so hopeful, open-ended, and optimistic – seems the most salubrious of choices. And yet, perhaps because the concept is so fundamental and familiar, we rarely ask a central question: What is freedom? We assume we truly know its meaning. But do we? Freedom has become like the operating systems that power our computers and the world – something the vast majority of us rely on, take for granted, without really understanding what it is and how it works. I believe that some, but not all, of our divisions are rooted in the lack of clear understanding of this guiding ideal. In this short space, I want to describe a definition of freedom that is more accurate and hence more useful than the common understandings rooted in politics because it is based in the timeless laws of physics. This scientific lens, which is based on the work of Adrian Bejan, the celebrated professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University with whom I wrote the 2012 book “Design in Nature,” allows us to see freedom more fully and more accurately, in all its power and glory. Start with the common understandings. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines freedom as “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.” Other meanings include “the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved,” and “the power of self-determination attributed to the will.” Clear enough, so what’s the problem? These definitions offer a cramped and limited view of freedom, casting it as a human creation, as an idea that chiefly applies to the relations among people. Sure, we might say butterflies are free, that the time spent in the mountains – or even pants with an elastic waist – feel freeing, but those are metaphorical uses of a political concept. Ever since the ancient Greeks, freedom has concerned people. Through hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and dozens of books, Bejan discovered that freedom is far more expansive. It is not a human concept but a physical reality. The life of butterflies, and everything around us, hinges on freedom. He summarized this insight in a powerful statement he first articulated in 1995 and which he calls the constructal law. It states: For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve with freedom in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it. I know that’s a mouthful, but the idea is simple: Everything on our planet that moves – water on the ground, blood in our bodies, money through economies – constitutes a system composed of the current (water, blood, money) and channels they flow through (rivers, arteries, economies). Given the freedom to move and to change, these flow systems evolve with a specific direction in time, to move more current (or mass) more easily. To see how, consider the first raindrops that fell to earth. In the beginning they were isolated entities. But soon they began to coalesce because it was easier to move or flow together. Over millions of years, these unthinking, inanimate molecules carved out rivulets, brooks, streams and rivers. Today, these tree-like river basins cover the globe, moving water from the plain to the ocean’s mouth far more efficiently than if the raindrops had been destined to seep by their lonesome. Through his own extensive research and that of collaborators around the globe, Bejan has shown how the constructal law predicts the emergence and evolution of the designs that give shape and structure to our world. The same principle explains why air coalesces to form jet streams in the sky and why human history is the story of greater and easier movement of people, goods, money and ideas. All self-organize into better channels that allow them to flow more easily across the landscape. Why does this happen? We don’t know. Like the laws of thermodynamics – which predict that hot should move to cold, that matter should be conserved – the constructal law is a first principle of physics that summarizes an observable and universal phenomenon: the tendency of matter to generate evolving designs that increase flow access. There is no mechanism behind it; it is an uncaused cause. It all hinges on freedom: the freedom of flowing matter to generate evolving. It is the secret sauce of nature. Our planet evolved from a fiery molten ball into a wondrous sphere of oceans and rivers, mountains and forests, cities and air transport systems because of the freedom of everything that moves to generate designs that allow them to flow more easily. Bejan put it this way to me: “Freedom is many physical (measurable) features that allow an observed object to change. No freedom, no change. No change, no evolution. No evolution, no life. Freedom is physics—biological and nonbiological—and so is evolution, nature, and life.” As I am writing for RealClearPolitics, the question remains: If freedom is not an exclusively human creation, how does physics change the way we should think about politics? First, it shows us the limits of the common understanding of freedom as a fixed set of outcomes – as a chiseled-in-stone set of laws and practices against which human behavior must be measured. Don’t get me wrong, it is good to have ideals. But while they tell us where we might want to go, they do not tell us how to get there. This common understanding falsely assumes that ideas like freedom are simply things that we choose to embrace or reject. When we ask, for example, why democracy didn’t flourish in Russia after the fall of communism or in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, our answers revolve around the failings of leaders and the led. The constructal law provides a better answer by showing that politics is anchored in physical realities – in the evolving systems through which ideas and laws, rights and practices move from the centers of power to the people and vice versa. In developed democracies such as the United States, the rule of law, the concepts of “one person one vote,” free and fair elections, and a free press are just a few of the “currents” that move through the designs of a democracy. These currents and channels cannot be simply imposed in one fell swoop; they must evolve, over time, building on what was, like the raindrops that gradually created the mighty river basins from the tiniest rivulets. In assessing political systems, the central question is not, how free is it compared to some utopian ideal, but to what extent does it permit or restrict the freedom of people, ideas, goods, money, and all the rest to self-organize into designs that allow those things to move more easily? Bejan, who grew up in Romania under communism, notes that dictatorships are doomed to failure because they are not just fighting the people, but physics. Censorship, coercion, and intimidation are the tools they use to constrain the tendency of everything in nature – which includes people – to flow more freely. Finally, the physics of freedom should give us a new appreciation of the Founding Fathers. Their greatest gift to us was not the rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution but a political system that was truly free – one that could evolve, get better. Those who see our past as a golden age are as misguided as those who view our history as a series of moral failures. America truly is a great experiment because our capacity for change means we never are, but are always becoming. In freedom.

On Mon, 4 Jul 2022 23:06:03 -0400 grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:

Declare Your Independence From Tyranny, America

notice that the US cesspool was created by means of a coup financed by the french monarchy. The lowest, non human scum on the planet namely jefferson, franklin and all the rest of white, slave-owning oligarchs and puritan madmen betrayed their english accomplices and replaced the english government with their own SLAVE tyranny. And that is of course what non-human KKK trash like grancrap, jim bell, and the rest of US assholes on this fine 'cypherpunk' list 'celebrate'.