Ukrainian Men Finding It Harder to Leave Country – Media
Ukrainian men who are allowed to leave the country are finding it increasingly difficult to do so due to roadblocks set up by border guards, according to local media. Some reports have suggested that the agents’ actions are based on a secret internal document calling for a tightening of the country’s borders.
The Ukrainian outlet Strana.ua reported on Saturday, citing people attempting to cross into Poland, that officials are requiring all men, including those transporting humanitarian aid, those who are physically impaired, or have many children, to present a certificate issued by a recruitment office.
The website noted, quoting an eyewitness, that the inspections resulted in long queues at the border, adding that all checkpoints are now manned by recruitment officers. According to the article, even those who previously had no problems crossing the border could now only leave Ukraine if military officials allow it.
Most Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 were barred from leaving the country after the general mobilization in February 2022. However, there were certain exceptions, and Ukrainians with physical disabilities or those who have many children were usually permitted to leave the country if they simply had the appropriate documents confirming their status.
The logjam was confirmed by former Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Gennady Zubko, who told the outlet NV that border guards did not explicitly state the reason for the roadblocks. The ex-official also claimed that border agents cited an internal classified document, which they refused to show.
Meanwhile, Strana.ua reported that the border situation sparked protests, with an unspecified number of Ukrainians blocking a road near the checkpoint not far from Poland. A bus passenger stuck in transit complained about “the complete mess, absurdity and lack of subordination on part of the checkpoint’s employees,” as quoted by the outlet.
However, Andrey Demchenko, the spokesman for Ukraine’s Border Service, denied that the rules had been changed. However, he said that his agency “always carefully checks the conditions of departure and strictly observes the legislation,” adding that this year alone it has denied exit to nearly 50,000 people.
The reported border issues come as Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said earlier this month that his military had asked him to mobilize another 450,000-500,000 to replenish battlefield losses, although later Valery Zaluzhny, Kiev’s top general, pushed back on that claim.
The two officials’ comments come as Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive failed to break Russian defenses in over six months, with Kiev suffering around 160,000 casualties, according to Moscow.
Vivek Ramaswamy Issues Emergency Warning: Southern Border Is Now A UN Invasion Frontier
Major Tsunami Warning Issued After Powerful 7.6 Earthquake Strikes Japan
Japan has issued a major tsunami warning following a series of strong earthquakes on Monday A massive earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 hit Ishikawa and nearby prefectures in central Japan, triggering the tsunami […]
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McDonald’s Franchise Sues Israel Boycott Movement – Reuters
McDonald’s Malaysia is suing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Malaysia movement for damaging its business through a series of social media posts linking the fast-food chain to Israel’s “genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza,” Reuters reported on Sunday citing court documents.
According to a writ of summons dated December 19 and seen by the news agency, Gerbang Alaf Restaurants (GAR), which controls the McDonald’s franchise in the country, has accused BDS Malaysia of promoting boycotts against its restaurants with “false and defamatory statements,” which resulted in a loss of profits and job cuts. GAR is now seeking damages from the movement in the amount of 6 million ringgit ($1.31 million).
McDonald’s Malaysia confirmed it had started court proceedings against BDS Malaysia in a statement on Friday, saying it is seeking to protect its “rights and interests” in the country. The latter, meanwhile, said it “categorically denies” any wrongdoing and expects the court to sort the matter out.
Israel declared war on Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controlled Gaza, after the latter’s October 7 surprise attack that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis. Since then, an Israeli offensive has resulted in the deaths of over 21,000 Palestinians in the enclave, according to the local health ministry. Many activists, especially in majority-Muslim countries, have since launched boycott campaigns against businesses with alleged ties to Israel and called for an end to hostilities. Apart from McDonald’s, the companies targeted by the campaigns include Coca-Cola, Starbucks, KFC, Nestle, and IBM.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have staged a de facto blockade of shipping through the Red Sea and attacked vessels thought to be linked to Israel, which they say is also in solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians.
The Malaysian government is an outspoken champion of the Palestinians, and earlier this month reversed its 2002 decision to allow Israeli-flagged ships or vessels headed for the Jewish state to dock or load cargo at its ports, according to an announcement by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s office.
Vivek Ramaswamy Issues Emergency Warning: Southern Border Is Now A UN Invasion Frontier
The Year that Expertise Collapsed
Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places.
As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily.
In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences. It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance.
We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong. A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings.
The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse.
It felt like a coup d’etat of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew.
It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too.
The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule.
Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy.
Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future.
All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more – arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time.
The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that.
In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports.
“She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.”
Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X, when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids. He actually said this.
As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator.
It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities.
One explanation comes down to the money trail. That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others.
Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place.
One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts, published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great followup volume is Ramesh Thakur’s Our Enemy, the Government, which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all.
Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today.
We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing.
There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people – each person a dissident in his own field – had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want.
The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease.
Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds? Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity. Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes.
There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles.
In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a US-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble.
What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society.
Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited.
To replace them – and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute – we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.
Vivek Ramaswamy Issues Emergency Warning: Southern Border Is Now A UN Invasion Frontier
Central Banks Brought Inflation — Now They Bring Stagnation.
Although the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank’s message regarding interest rate cuts seems clear, reiterating their commitment to reducing inflation, the market is expecting between five and six interest rate cuts, between 125 and 150 basis points, in the next twelve months.
This shows us the bubble bias of many investors. We live in a world where two generations of market participants have only seen rate cuts and massive liquidity injections. Central banks have created huge perverse incentives in markets that should have been prevented if they truly followed their mandate of stable prices. On top of it, the ECB faces another risk. It must avoid following the siren calls of interventionists if it wants the euro project to survive.
The euro is the biggest monetary success of the last 100 years, and the ECB’s excessively loose policy may destroy its position as a world reserve currency. The interventionist hordes of European socialism want the central bank to become an instrument in the hands of governments to nationalize the economy and destroy the currency’s purchasing power.
Don’t be mistaken; for those who come up with soft words demanding “expansive-looking monetary policy,” what they are looking for is exactly what they have supported in Argentina, Venezuela, and Cuba: the expropriation of wealth through the dissolution of the purchasing power of the currency.
It would be completely irresponsible to implement massive rate cuts for several reasons.
Central banks are placing all the focus on the price and not the quantity of money. Ignoring monetary aggregates is very dangerous, and centering decisions only on rates may create a larger problem: a market bubble and a real economy contraction.
By ignoring monetary aggregates, central banks may cut rates with no real effect on the productive economy and solve nothing. There may be a significant contraction in economic activity even if rates decline, as credit availability worsens even with declining rates, but markets keep inflating the financial bubble.
Inflation has not declined persistently. Since the consumer price index is a year-on-year calculation from a very high figure, the base effect accounts for up to 85% of the decline in inflation. The same base effect could adversely affect inflation in the coming months if the annual path of price rises remains.The greatest economic aberration of our time, negative interest rates, actually made the structural weakness in the economy worse, causing it to slow down.
The economy has been accumulating poor and indebted growth data for years in which misguided so-called “expansive” monetary policies have been implemented. Negative rates and extreme liquidity injection have not generated greater or better growth but have left states with enormous imbalances.
Consumers are still suffering from the monetary disaster created in 2020. We are talking about a cumulative inflation rate of more than 22% since 2018 and a price rise that continues to be worrying, particularly in non-replaceable goods.
Monetary aggregates show that there is a private sector recession disguised by accumulated debt. Between January 2020 and July 2022, the money supply (M2) soared by an insane $6.3 trillion, according to FRED. It has declined almost a trillion dollars from its peak. The impact of this decline in money supply on the availability of credit and the broad economy will not be evident until 2024, when it coincides with an enormous wall of debt maturities. Central banks went from excess money to overlooking the money slump. Both are equally negative. One created the inflation burst, and the second is driving a private sector recession disguised by debt.
Inflation is a monetary effect. What some call cost inflation, commodity inflation, or supply shock is nothing more than more units of issued currency than real economic growth going to relatively scarce assets. Unit prices may rise for exogenous reasons, but they do not generate a sustained and cumulative rise in aggregate prices, which is what measures inflation. If a price soars due to an exogenous factor, the rest of the price does not rise at once if the currency issued remains constant relative to economic growth.
Of course, the system creates a whole series of experts who blame inflation on everything and anyone except for the only thing that can make aggregate prices rise at once, consolidate that annual burst, and continue to rise: the decrease in the purchasing power of the currency.
Those who understand money predict inflation and warn of the current risk. From Steve Hanke’s articles and the Inflation Dashboard that accurately predicted the inflation eruption of 2021–22, Richard Burdekin, “The U.S. Money Explosion of 2020: Monetarism and Inflation” (2020), to Claudio Borio, “Does money growth help explain the recent inflation surge?” (2023), or Juan Castañeda and Tim Congdon, “Inflation, The Next Threat?” (2020), dozens of studies warned of the arrival of inflation by excess monetary and explained the empirically monetary cause. Some argue that in 2009–2019 there was no inflation and money was also printed massively, but they do not understand the quantitative theory of money and ignore that the monetary expansion of 2020–22 was up to five times greater than that of the previous period of stimulus plans, as well as fully dedicated to government spending programs.
If we look at the contraction of monetary aggregates, inflation should have dropped faster, and the economy would be in a recession. However, the accumulated effect of massive money growth added to an unstoppable debt-fueled government deficit makes the impact of the 2020–21 liquidity explosion disguise the risks.
Inflation was created by the wrong monetary policy, and incorrect central bank measures may have lasting negative impacts on the economy. The first effect is evident: governments continue to crowd out the real economy, and families and businesses suffer the entire burden of rate hikes. Maybe the objective was always to increase the size of the public sector at any cost and implement a gradual nationalization of the economy.
Market participants should stop encouraging bubble-generating policies, and central banks should focus on monetary aggregates to avoid boom and bust cycles. The negative effects of the current money slump may arrive at once with the wall of maturities. Even if we avoid a recession, it will likely be a false way out with a debt-bloated government consumption figure, weak productivity, and private sector growth.
Vivek Ramaswamy Issues Emergency Warning: Southern Border Is Now A UN Invasion Frontier
Legacy Media Complains Social Media Platforms Aren’t Censoring “Deepfakes” Enough Ahead of 2024 Elections
The Associated Press (AP) used to be a reliable wire service – that provided actual news, stripped of opinion or interpretation, for news media to incorporate in their own reporting.
But, things have changed. In a piece “warning” that deepfakes have gone “mainstream” the AP also manages to claim, right in the title, that social media “guardrails” are fading. Spoiler: the article’s call to action is basically, “We need (even) more censorship here.”
The footnote to the piece is interesting. Usually, these are simply legal warnings, and other factual information – but here, the agency defines itself as one that “receives support from several private foundations.”
For what purpose? “To enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy.” (The phrase, “explanatory coverage of democracy” doesn’t sound like not something George Orwell would edit out of his writing.)
And now for, how one covers elections, and democracy, in an “explanatory” fashion. First, this is all about the 2024 US presidential ballot, although it starts off by mentioning the previous election.
The January 6 riots, then what the authors term to be “false election conspiracy theories” (so – there true ones?) are there to frame the message about what must happen ahead of 2024. And, clearly, in order to help those now in power remain there.
AP’s warning: however bad things were for democracy (from the pro-Biden point of view) the last time, they are now going to get worse. After all, hand-picked “experts” say so.
There’s also an almost comedic moment in the article, when former President Trump – himself since 2016 the victim of the notion that “elections can’t be trusted” and many Democrats believing he is not a legitimately elected president and free to say so – accompanied by a fierce media campaign – is now accused as the one guilty of the trend.
“Many Americans, egged on by former President Donald Trump, have continued to push the unsupported idea that elections throughout the U.S. can’t be trusted. A majority of Republicans (57%) believe Democrat Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president,” writes the AP.
Then, there’s that fear of deepfakes as supposedly the be-all-end-all of what’s, in reality, an extremely complex election process – and in reality, that “fear” is there simply as a vehicle to force social media platforms to censor content even more ahead of the 2024 vote.
“I expect a tsunami of misinformation. I can’t prove that. I hope to be proven wrong. But the ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified,” said University of Washington’s Oren Etzioni, unwittingly shooting the whole “anti deepfakes conspiracy theory,” right in the foot.
Vivek Ramaswamy Issues Emergency Warning: Southern Border Is Now A UN Invasion Frontier