Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

– Ray Bradbury

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

On paper – under the First Amendment, at least – we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

This is the very definition of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

It’s happening already.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

Little by little, Americans are being conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.

This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. The erosion of our freedoms has happened so incrementally, no one seems to have noticed. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognize the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry have become fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are on that downward slope now.

In the end, Lula got his wish and won his quiet war with Brazil’s central bank.

As BBG’s Sebastian Boyd writes, Brazil’s central bank “couldn’t help but surprise traders today”, and it did so not only with the first rate cut in three years, ending its tightening cycle – which sent the Selic target rate from 2% in March 2021 to 13.75 % in August 2022 – but also did so with a bigger cut than many expected.

The Copom cut the policy rate by 50bp to 13.25% in a tight 5-4 split decision, after keeping it at 13.75% for exactly one year. The four dissenting votes were for a milder 25bp cut. 

Going into the meeting, swaps traders were roughly evenly split between 25 and 50 bps, while 30 of 41 economists in Bloomberg’s survey expected a 25-bp cut and 11 saw 50 bps. The bank said it considered cutting the Selic by a quarter-point, but chose to make a larger cut because of continuing improvement in the country’s inflation outlook.

“If the scenario evolves as expected, the committee members unanimously anticipate further reductions of the same magnitude in the next meetings, and it judges that this pace is appropriate to keep the necessary contractionary monetary policy for the disinflationary process,” the Central Bank of Brazil said in a statement.

And while Brazil wasn’t the first central bank to cut its key interest rate first – Uruguay was first, and Chile also followed with a larger-than-expected cut last week – it is by far the biggest so far. Interestingly, the decision was not unanimous. Both the new appointee, Gabriel Galipolo and the president Roberto Campos Neto voted for 50 bps.

The decision was dovish to market expectations but not to market pricing. The (bi-modal) market consensus was leaning towards a 25bp rate cut: of the 41 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, 31 expected a 25bp rate cut and 10 a larger 50bp rate cut.

Even with the larger-than-expected cut Wednesday, the gap between inflation and the Selic rate remains wide and even deeper cuts may be in store, said Gino Olivares, chief economist at Azimut Brasil Wealth Management.

If the central bank trims half a percentage point for the next three meetings, “we will have the Selic at 11.75% at the end of the year, which is still a contractionist level,” Olivares said. “In the future, they will have to evaluate whether to accelerate the pace of easing.”

As the WSJ notes, the central bank began raising the Selic after inflation started to pick up toward the end of 2020 and then rose faster as the Brazil’s economy recovered from the pandemic-induced slowdown. The Russian invasion of Ukraine later pushed inflation even higher as energy and food prices gained amid supply disruptions.

Higher interest rates are now having the expected effect on inflation and the economy, and other factors are also helping calm concerns at the central bank, said Matheus Pizzani, an economist at brokerage CM Capital Markets.

“The more recent evolution of inflation has been closer to what was hoped,” Pizzani said. High rates are helping slow the economy, concerns about the new Brazilian government’s fiscal policies have eased, and the outlook for services inflation is improving, he added.

* * *

In justifying its decision, the Copom – which just a few months ago was contemplating raising its inflation target – signaled the need to maintain a contractionary monetary stance until the disinflationary process consolidates and inflation expectations anchor around its targets. The Copom stated that the improvement of the inflation backdrop, reflecting in part the lagged effects of monetary policy, coupled with the reduction of longer-term inflation expectations provided “the necessary confidence to start a gradual cycle of monetary policy easing”.

The Copom considered the option of reducing the Selic rate to 13.50%, but concluded that it was appropriate to adopt a 50bp cut in this meeting due to an improvement in the inflation dynamics, reinforcing, however, the firm objective of keeping a contractionary monetary policy to re-anchor expectations and bring inflation to the target over the relevant horizon.

The forward guidance points to the maintenance of the current pace of rate cuts in the next meetings (view held by all directors if the macro scenario evolves as expected). The characterization of the balance of risks for inflation suffered significant modifications but remained broadly neutral. The conditional inflation forecast for end-2024 did not improve (remained at 3.4%; i.e., still above the 3.0% target by end-2024 target.

Some economists say part of the current decline in Brazil’s 12-month inflation readings are temporary, stemming from fuel tax cuts the government applied last year. That effect is likely to dissipate in coming months, leading to a possible uptick in the headline inflation measure even as the economy slows, said CM Capital’s Pizzani.

“Inflation readings will increasingly reflect actual supply and demand imbalances,” he said. He sees inflation bouncing back to 4.8% in December, before falling to 3.8% a year later.

Looking ahead, Goldman expects the Copom to cut the Selic rate by 50 bp at the three remaining 2023 meetings, driving the Selic to 11.75% by end-end.

Here are some more details on the rate cut from Goldman

• 1. For the Copom, the decision to cut 50bp to 13.25% “is compatible with the strategy of convergence of inflation to around the target over the relevant horizon for monetary policy, which includes the 2024, and to a lesser extent 2025, calendar years.” We highlight that 2025 entered the relevant horizon for monetary policy in the August meeting (previously the only relevant horizon was the 2024 calendar years).
• 2. The Copom reiterated the need to maintain a contractionary monetary stance until the disinflationary process consolidates and inflation expectations anchor around its targets.
• 3. The Copom stated that the improvement of the inflation backdrop, reflecting in part the lagged effects of monetary policy, coupled with the reduction of longer-term inflation expectations, after the recent decision of the National Monetary Council on the inflation target, “have given the necessary confidence to start a gradual cycle of monetary policy easing”.
• 4. The Copom considered the option of reducing the Selic rate to 13.50%, but it concluded that it was appropriate to adopt a 50bp in this meeting due to an improvement in the inflation dynamics, reinforcing, however, the firm objective of keeping a contractionary monetary policy to reanchor expectations and bring inflation to the target over the relevant horizon. For the Copom, the current context, characterized by a stage in which the disinflationary process tends to be slower and with partial reanchoring of inflation expectations, requires serenity and moderation in the conduct of monetary policy.
• 5. Forward guidance: No acceleration in the pace of rate cuts. For the Copom, if the macro scenario evolves as expected, its members unanimously anticipate further cuts of the same magnitude in the next meetings, and judge that this pace [-50bp] is appropriate to keep the monetary stance contractionary necessary for the disinflationary process.
• 6. Finally, the Copom emphasized that the total magnitude of the easing cycle throughout time will depend on the inflation dynamics, especially the components that are more sensitive to monetary policy and economic activity, on inflation expectations (in particular long-term expectations), on its inflation projections, on the output gap, and on the balance of risks.
• 7. The Reference Scenario with a BRL/USD that follows a PPP path starting at 4.75 (vs. 4.85 at the June meeting), the Selic path of the market scenario, and where oil prices follow approximately the futures curve for the next six-months, and rise 2% per year thereafter, shows headline inflation at 4.9% by end-2023 (5.0% at the June meeting and still above the 3.25% target), 3.4% by end-2024 (3.4% at the June meeting and closer to the 3.00% target), and 3.0% for end-2025 (vs 3.1 in the June QIR). The assumption for inflation in regulated tariffs/prices rose for 2023 (+40bp to 9.4%) and were unchanged for 2024 (at 4.6%). That is, in this scenario the conditional inflation forecasts for end-2024 remained above the target.
• 8. The characterization of the balance of risks for inflation suffered significant modifications but remained broadly neutral.
  • a. As upside risks to the inflation outlook and inflation expectations, the Copom mentions: (i) greater persistence of global inflationary pressures; and (ii) stronger than expected services inflation resilience/stickiness due to a tighter output gap. The Copom added risk (ii) and deleted as upside risks to inflation: “some residual” uncertainty about the final design of fiscal framework to be approved in Congress and, more relevant for monetary policy, its impact on the expectations for public debt and inflation paths, and on risky assets and a deeper or more persistent unanchoring of long-term inflation expectations.
  • b. As downside risks, the Copom stated: (i) a deeper than expected deceleration of global economic activity, particularly due to adverse conditions in the global financial system; and (ii) stronger than expected impact on global inflation from synchronized monetary policy tightening. As downside risks the Copom added risk (ii) and deleted from the statement the risks from: (i) additional decline of the price of commodities measured in local currency (although a sizeable part of this movement has already been observed); and; (ii) a slowdown in domestic credit origination that is deeper than what would be compatible with the current stance of monetary policy.
• 9. The Copom’s updated scenario can be summarized as follows.
  • a. The global environment remains uncertain, with some disinflation at the margin, but against an environment with still high core inflation and labor market resilience in many countries.
  • b. On the domestic front, the Copom repeated that “the recent set of indicators remains in line with the baseline scenario of activity deceleration” in the coming quarters.
  • c. Notwithstanding the recent reduction of headline inflation, the Copom anticipates an increase in annual headline inflation during 2H2013. Moreover, several core inflation measures have declined recently but remain above the inflation target.

While the pedo-loving propagandists at the once-great Rolling Stone and other major media outlets attacked the anti-child-trafficking film “Sound of Freedom,” calling it a “QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking” which is “designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer” — the FBI announced Tuesday it rescued more than 200 sex trafficking victims during a two-week nationwide operation in July. 

Known as “Operation Cross Country,” nearly every FBI field office was involved in the annual two-week operation that led to the arrest of 126 suspects of child sexual exploitation and human trafficking offenses, and 68 suspects of trafficking were identified or arrested. 

The bureau and its local partners found 59 minor victims of child sex trafficking and sexual exploitation and another 59 children who had been reported missing. 

“Human traffickers prey on the most vulnerable members of our society, and their crimes scar victims — many of them children — for life. The FBI’s commitment to combatting this threat will never waver, and we will continue to send our message that these atrocities will not be tolerated,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.

“Sex traffickers exploit and endanger some of the most vulnerable members of our society and cause their victims unimaginable harm,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said

Garland continued, “This operation, which located 59 actively missing children, builds on the tremendous work the FBI has undertaken over many years to rescue minor victims and arrest those responsible for these unspeakable crimes. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners across the country to prevent human trafficking; increase detection, investigation and prosecution of human trafficking crimes; and expand support and services to protect and empower survivors.”

The FBI worked with a child protection organization, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and concentrated efforts on “identifying and locating victims of sex trafficking and investigating and arresting individuals and criminal enterprises involved in both child sex and human trafficking.”

While the operation was underway, Jim Caviezel’s anti-child-trafficking Sound of Freedom film was released nationwide on theater screens and became a summer blockbuster. However, a chorus of mainstream hit pieces denounced it as a “QAnon” conspiracy flick.

Even Bloomberg.

Is ‘Sound of Freedom’ a QAnon dog whistle, or is it just another thriller? @nberlat saw the movie and has an answer. https://t.co/qmk1Sa7DNg via @opinion

— Bloomberg (@business) July 15, 2023

We should be grateful for the people who made the film and put a spotlight on the unspoken truth of child sex trafficking and sexual exploitation. We should be asking why the mainstream corporate press made a concerted effort to play down the issue. 

Authored by Rob Smith via RealClear Markets,

What were the Redneck’s last words before he died? Answer: watch this fellas! Men are conquerors, if this were not true, America would’ve never been discovered. Our “conquer” DNA makes us do things that women will never understand. Admittedly, some of the things we do can fairly be described as “stupid.” But, we have to do what we have to do.  A couple weeks ago, I was in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was late evening, and I was sitting on a park bench in a lovely and lush park with an enchanting young lass. The sun was setting, and her perfume blended with the subtle, cool breezes blowing off Long Island Sound, enriching the amorous senses of your author. But suddenly, I had to get up. I walked 50 paces and proudly peed on some city park shrubbery. The ingénue was quite puzzled. However, I had to do what I had to do to tell Greenwich, Conn that I was the boss of it. Rick put Elsa on the plane in Casablanca, this was kind of the same thing.

My son Coleman and I exercise our conquer gene in multiple ways. One of which is, if we see water we have to go in. Swimming in Maine when not even the natives will put their toe in the water is our way to tell the ocean, we own you, you are our bitch and we are not afraid of you. Like I said, I don’t expect you ladies to understand. Last year Coleman and I were hiking down a canyon in Southern California. When we got to the bottom, there was a lagoon with what looked like venomous snakes swimming across it. Coleman gave me a look that said “c’mon dad, let’s do it,” and promptly dived in. I have never been prouder of my son for doing anything stupider!

Lately, the mainstream and very liberal news media has been telling us that we are experiencing record high temperatures in their efforts to spread fear and get us to swallow the hoax of climate change. It’s not that hot, indeed it has been a mild summer.  News flash: it is supposed to be hot in the summer. Now one of the cognitive benefits of doing “stupid conquer” stuff is having historical memory about the condition of the elements.  Not terribly long ago, when I should’ve been a responsible adult since I had 3 children to put through private school, my other stupid male friends and I participated in what we called “The Heat Bowl.” On what we deemed were likely the hottest days of the year, generally around 105 degrees, we would play tennis (on hard courts) under the boiling sun. I remember many a Heat Bowl and many 105-degree days. By the way when John Blankenship got heat stroke after one of our matches, we teased him unmercifully because that’s all a part of being a stupid male. Ladies, I trust you are taking notes. I remember many consecutive weeks in the high 90s, and summers when the thermometer was well over 100 for 7 days. I remember being in Virginia Beach when it was 110 degrees. My buds and I had a contest to see who could walk the farthest barefoot on the hot sand. My feet did not fare well that day, and I was called the P word.

So to the Main Stream Media, I raise my middle finger, you can’t fool me because I actually have a memory. With this said, I am amazed at all those who don’t. Yesterday, this lady who comes into Starbucks every day was complaining about the “record” heat. She’s one of those New York Times reading types.  She’s married to some academic and she walks 10 blocks to Starbucks wearing one of those “I” whatever you call it facemasks. She’s in her mid-70s, you would think she might have a memory without having to consort with the NYT and NPR to tell her how to think, but no, she is a robot whose memory card has been yanked out.

I fear for my country. It is as though everyone was “born yesterday” and they wake up, log onto social media and are then given their orders on what to believe.  Yet, no one seems to remember how wrong many of our “distinguished experts” and media personalities have been in the past and how many times. If it happened more than two days ago, well it didn’t happen. So in an effort to save western civilization, here are a few tips that will keep you from being a mindless drone and a Stepford Wife to the mainstream media:

• Don’t believe anything you read or any video you watch. Everybody has an agenda, even your very humble and modest author. My agenda is simple and noble, I want to save western civilization. However, all the other pundits out there are evil manipulators. Before you swallow what these charlatans say, check what tribe they belong to and who might be greasing their palms. Who do they want to suck up to and what are their past life experiences? Have they ever owned a company and had to fret about not making payroll on a Friday?  Has the pundit ever had an independent thought or does he just mouth what everyone else in his tribe mouths?

• The lessons of history teach us virtually everything we need to know about economics, politics, sociology, philosophy and the nature of man. To learn the lessons of history, never pay any attention to any university professor, especially an Ivy League professor ( see # 1 above). In fact, your first synapse of thought should be to disbelieve whatever they say. Read lots of history (nonfiction) written by authors who are independent and NOT university professors. Discuss what you have read with “real” people who are engaged in the private sector for their livelihood and have practical knowledge and life experiences dealing with all the vagaries of the human condition.

• Does the pundit practice what Plato called the “noble lie?” Is he so obsessed with his holiness and righteous mission that he feels justified in purposefully lying to achieve what he deems to be the greater good?

• Don’t be bedazzled by fancy titles and those who cling to the title of “expert.” Many experts justify their existence by creating new theories of thought that bring attention to themselves, as opposed to solving practical issues. Fancy talkers are not necessarily fancy thinkers. My dad used to use the term “slaughters the King’s English,” as in “she’s a great waitress, but boy does she slaughter the King’s English.” No one loves clever semantics executed with proper Strunk and White precision more than I do, but there are a lot of “Bubbas” and “Tammy Sues” whose verb conjugations aren’t perfect, but who are smart as a whip with intelligence skills that the tweed jacket and ascot wearing college professor does not have.

• How many times has the pundit been wrong?  I’ve never experienced this sensation, but if I ever were to be wrong about anything, I would imagine I would have great remorse and would be extraordinarily careful in the future to phrase my punditry in a truthful manner. Most of our pundits, politicians and media personalities lie with impunity because they know in two days’ time your memory card will be wiped clean. When a pundit has been wrong many times and shows no remorse or willingness to reverse course, the pundit has an agenda and is not interested in the truth

• The door-to-door vacuum salesman is trying to sell you a vacuum.  That’s obvious, but many don’t realize that the pundit and news personality is also a salesman. Treat the pundit and news personality the same way you treat the vacuum salesman. Shop around and vet several vacuum salesmen, both door to door and those at the appliance store. Talk to real people who use vacuums like the ones you are considering buying.

Memory. The best answers to every vexing investment decision, public policy problem or even questions on relationships all stem from having and retaining a long memory. What works, what doesn’t work and why. The world’s memory is history. The virtue signalers, the Karens and the woke all want to twist and subvert history for their own self-indulgent reasons, almost always stemming from some sort of hatred or antipathy towards people in the present. To them, history is a tool to “get something” today. To others such as your humble author, it is a tool to learn how to prevent future mistakes. How do you know what to believe? History is human nature. Place yourself in the exact time frame and under the exact circumstances, be honest and ask yourself what you would have done.  99.9% of the time, you would not have been Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Nathan Hale, you would’ve pursued your self-interest which we are all prone to do. History is always the result of the way we are wired.

Getting back to the Heat Bowl. History is replete with the devilishness of kings and their proxies who spread fear so they can have an excuse to take away your liberty. The Climate Change hoax is a rerun of a plot that’s been foisted on mankind throughout recorded history. This play is as old as Pericles’ Odean theatre.

Luckily, there are stupid men who do stupid things and you Dear Reader can go watch the yearly Heat Bowl contests on ESPN Classics and see that it was much hotter then than it is now.

Robert C. Smith is Managing Partner of Chartwell Capital Advisors and likes to opine on the Rob Is Right Podcast and Webpage.

In a bombshell new report, Financial Times has revealed that President Biden plans to formally ask Congress to use funds to arm Taiwan utilizing the supplemental budge for Ukraine. 

The report states that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget “will include funding for Taiwan in the supplemental request as part of an effort to accelerate the provision of weapons, according to two people familiar with the plan.”

If approved by Congress, this would be a major milestone in Washington’s bolstering Taiwan’s defense, given the self-ruled island would for the first time ever receive American arms through what’s called “foreign military financing.”

It would also mark a first time use of the “presidential drawdown authority” for Taiwan, meaning the Pentagon would tap its own stockpiles which has long been used to supply Ukraine.

The FT report has come on the heels of last Friday’s newly announced White House aid package of up to $345 million for Taiwan. 

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office issued another blistering condemnation of US military support to Taiwan, underscoring that Beijing’s efforts to unify the island to the mainland will continue undeterred. 

“No matter how much of the ordinary people’s taxpayer money the … Taiwanese separatist forces spend, no matter how many U.S. weapons, it will not shake our resolve to solve the Taiwan problem,” Taiwan Affairs Office said, adding “…Or shake our firm will to realize the reunification of our motherland.”

Meanwhile, Nikkei Asia has observed in some fresh analysis that the Chinese PLA military has steadily increased and even sped up preparations to blockade Taiwan ever since the Pelosi visit. This has continued unabated, FT observes, writing:

China has greatly increased its conducting of military drills simulating the containment of Taiwan since then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island a year ago. Nikkei analyzed the possibility of China’s invasion of Taiwan, using drone-taken images and views by experts.

Even the range of activities by the Chinese military around Taiwan has changed. Before Pelosi’s visit on Aug. 2 of last year, Chinese military planes and ships rarely moved around to the east of Taiwan. Instead, they primarily engaged in activities southwest of the island. Over the past year, they have become active in the Western Pacific, or the Philippine Sea, having Taiwan to the west.

Both of the large Chinese aircraft carriers–the Shandong, which was its first domestically developed aircraft carrier–and the Liaoning, have been spotted in waters near Taiwan, and are becoming more active in conducting war simulations, alarming Taipei further.

Looking at GDP and economic growth, one might ask the obvious: why does Taiwan need our constant taxpayer dollars on a continual basis (akin to Ukraine)? 

The Depression-era shantytowns known as Hoovervilles, are about to make a triumphal return smack in the middle of New York’s Central Park.

Amid a relentless influx of illegal immigrants that has exposed liberal NIMBY hypocrisy in the quote-unquote Sanctuary City that is New York, Bloomberg reports that officials are considering housing migrants in Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as part of a plan to find new sites for some of the more than 95,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in the past 15 months.

“Everything is on the table,” Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said Wednesday at a press conference when asked about housing migrants in city parks. The sites are among 3,000 locations the city is reviewing, she said.

LIVE NOW: Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom hosts an asylum seeker briefing at City Hall https://t.co/pHBpIWl4fK

— NYC Mayor’s Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) August 2, 2023

Gothamist first reported that New York City is considering erecting tents in the two major parks and on Randall’s Island as possible sites for the asylum seekers, citing unidentified people familiar with the discussions.

According to Bloomberg, Williams-Isom declined to comment on how imminent the plan is, and didn’t answer a question about who the city is working with on potential plans to house people in city parks, although it is safe to assume that Blackrock is going to expand its role as America’s favorite (and biggest) landlord monopolist by branching out into tents (and collecting a generous multi-billion government handout in the process).

A memo obtained by CNN earlier this year listed a YMCA in Park Slope, Brooklyn; a recreation center in Staten Island; the campuses of York College and Medgar Evers College; and the parking lot at Citi Field in Queens as possible shelter sites.

Placing migrants in temporary structures inside either Central Park or Prospect Park would bring high visibility to a crisis that’s dogged Mayor Eric Adams’s administration for months, and cement the city’s transformation into a modern version of the 1970’s crime and drug ridden Manhattan. On Tuesday, scores of people were sleeping and waiting for help on the sidewalks outside the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

Adams has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration for failing to provide significant logistical or financial aid to the city to help manage the crisis. The mayor and members of New York’s congressional delegation met last week with US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to discuss the issue.

On Wednesday, Williams-Isom denied the city is letting people sleep on the streets as a tactic to force the federal government to come to the city’s aid; it is however a tactic to ensure that many of the wealthiest New Yorkers depart the city for Florida, taking billions in income tax payments with them. No one in the Adams administration “would use any people to do a stunt,” Williams-Isom said, which is amusing because that’s precisely what people the Adams administration is doing.

The city’s shelter system housed 107,900 people as of July 30, a record high that has more than doubled since January 2022, when the total shelter census citywide stood at 45,000 people. Some 56,600 of the city’s current shelter residents are migrants.

On rare occasions in Central Park’s history, the iconic public space has been commandeered for housing in emergencies. During the Great Depression, homeless people set up “Hoovervilles” and in a few months, it will be as if a new Great Depression has arrived to what was once the world’s greatest city.

Authored by Richard Trzupek via The Epoch Times,

Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that middle school students in Florida will “be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”

Ms. Harris was referring to one of almost 200 focal points of instruction that the Florida Board of Education has adopted for instructors teaching African American history.

The passage in question says (pdf):

“Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

Besides being demonstrably true, that sentence is hardly a blanket endorsement of what used to be called “the Peculiar Institution” in antebellum America.

It’s clear that Florida middle schoolers will be taught that slavery was and is cruel and morally reprehensible. In that context, they will also learn that some slaves learned new skills like farming, smithing, carpentry, etc. during their servitude.

Repeating that truth hardly removes even one speck of the stain on our national soul that’s tied to slavery in America.

Some news outlets called VP Harris out for misrepresenting Florida’s curriculum.

Among those, the hosts on Fox News’s “The Five” discussed the issue, which led to Fox personality Greg Gutfeld making the following comment:

“Did you ever read ‘Man’s Search for Meaning?’ Vic Frankl talks about how you have to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility. Utility kept you alive.”

A number of left-leaning news outlets and politicians were horrified, having decided that Gutfeld was defending the Nazi extermination camps for supposedly providing educational opportunities for prisoners. “Let’s get something straight that the American people understand full well and that is not complicated: there was nothing good about slavery; there was nothing good about the Holocaust,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said. “Full stop.”

There was much more of the same sort of outrage spread far and wide. Reading the vitriol directed at Gutfeld, who combines thoughtful and witty about as well as any pundit going since P.J. O’Rourke passed away, was a depressing exercise. Depressing because this incident is yet another example of how many Americans have gone deliberately tone-deaf, attributing the worst possible motivations to anyone considered an enemy. What is said isn’t nearly as important as who said it. One can attribute any meaning one wants to words they don’t understand.

Clearly, the point of Florida’s guidance isn’t to glorify the practice of slavery, it’s to pay homage to the human spirit that can find a way to survive even in the worst of conditions. Clearly, that was Frankl’s point, and in referencing him, Gutfeld’s as well. Heroes aren’t created in cesspools like slavery and genocide. Heroes are forged in the fires of adversity. Just as no Israelite wanted to be under Pharoah’s thumb, no African-American wished to feel the boot-heal of the slave master on his or her neck. When freedom finally came, each would find they not only survived, but—for some—they even grew.

Recall the moment in “The Shawshank Redemption” when Captain Hadley is holding Andy Dufresne precariously at the edge of the roof, perhaps a moment away from letting him fall to his death. Dufresne explains to Hadley how he can get out of paying taxes on a $35,000 inheritance. It’s a turning point in the movie, the moment Dufresne stops being perpetually abused meat and starts to become a useful, and therefore somewhat respected, human being of sorts. Shawshank will not become heaven, but at least it will no longer be hell.

I was present at the memorial service recognizing the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau in 1995. The camps, located near my family’s ancestral home of Krakow, have always made a huge impression on me both for what they tell us about man’s cruelty and for what they tell us about man’s resiliency. I had the privilege to speak to some survivors, and the message I took away was this: In that horror, every prisoner had a choice: give up or try to find a way to keep going. I didn’t get a sense that anyone begrudged or belittled those who gave up. It was understandable, I suppose. But if you tried to keep going, there was little you wouldn’t try.

That was Frankl’s point. If you’re Andy Dufresne and you have great accounting skills, then you try to leverage those skills to make your life a little less hard. If you’re an inmate of an extermination camp and are an expert carpenter, you try to leverage those skills to get an extra ration, or a good blanket, or anything else that will keep you alive for another day. So no, in pointing this out, Greg Gutfeld wasn’t being outrageous. But the outraged? They’re being ridiculous.

China’s markets regulator is asking securities firms how to boost stock prices, stoking concerns that Beijing is desperate to restore investor confidence, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter.

Last week, the China Securities Regulatory Commission held a meeting with several brokerage houses to solicit feedback. Among the measures proposed by the brokers was a possible cut in the stamp duty on stocks trading, as well as a slowdown in IPO traffic to help boost liquidity, the people said.

The CSRC gave no indications of how they plan to boost the market, though the strategy session with brokers suggests that Chinese officials are highly motivated to carry out an earlier pledge by the Politburo to supercharge the nation’s $10 trillion stock market and boost investor confidence. Raising the prices of stocks, where quite a bit of household savings is tied up, would help Beijing shore up funding for the corporate sector.

Participating in last week’s consultation was a rare meet-up between the CSRC and global funds, where officials including Vice Chairman Fang Xinghai attempted to calm concerns among foreign investors over investing in China.

Chinese stocks have been weighed down by the nation’s slowing economy for much of this year, underperforming their emerging market peers at one point by the widest margin since at least 1999.

The CSI financials subgauge soared 4.6% on Friday, extending gains earlier this week amid market chatter of a stamp duty cut. Hithink Royalflush Information Network Co. surged 17% and China Galaxy Securities Co. jumped by the 10% daily limit.

The gains helped lift the CSI 300 Index by 2.3%. The benchmark gauge recorded the best weekly performance since November. Overseas investors net purchased 16 billion yuan ($2.3 billion) of mainland shares on Friday, taking the week’s inflows to the largest since January. -Bloomberg

“The speculation about cutting stamp duty has helped lift market sentiment today, as the move would be following the vows to boost financial markets mentioned during the Politburo” meeting, said Steven Leung, executive director at UOB-Kay Hian Hong Kong.

Authored by Connor Freeman via The Libertarian Institute, 

The Joe Biden administration released a report endorsing the renewal of a controversial law which enables US intelligence agencies to spy on foreign nationals and American citizens on Monday. This comes amid a heated debate in Congress regarding how such surveillance powers are weaponized against the American people, as well as a slew of scandals involving these capabilities being wielded by the FBI against protesters and lawmakers.

Published by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and Intelligence Oversight Board, the 42-page report states that a failure of Congress to renew Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act – before it expires at the end of the year – would constitute “one of the worst intelligence failures of our time.”

Section 702 authorizes a tool used by US spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets and any Americans with whom they may be interacting. This practice has long been criticized by domestic civil liberties groups because in the process also collected are US citizens’ electronic communications including phone calls, text messages, and emails.

Unless reauthorized in December, the law will expire. This will be complicated as growing animosity over the spy bureaucracies’ abuse of power continues to prompt stiff opposition and demands for extensive reforms from lawmakers across the aisle and particularly the GOP.

Most recently, a declassified court document revealed the FBI improperly searched a surveillance database created by Section 702 to search information about a US senator, a state senator, and a state judge.

A senior FBI official made clear to Politico that the unnamed FBI analyst who snooped on the US senator and the state senator was not authorized to conduct searches using “sensitive query terms,” including the names of people running for office or public officials. The improper searches did not even meet the threshold of being “reasonably likely to retrieve” evidence of a crime or foreign intelligence information.

Despite the claim that the analyst had evidence that these officials were being targeted by a foreign spy service, the aforementioned FBI official conceded to Politico that if the analyst had sought the required pre-approval from the deputy director for the queries, “they would not have been approved.”

In light of rampant misconduct, such as the targeting of January 6th and Black Lives Matter protesters during recent years, the White House’s report says “FBI personnel should receive additional training on what foreign intelligence entails.” The administration does acknowledge, however, that the bureau’s conduct “undermined public confidence in its ability to use Section 702 in the way it was intended.”

California-based startup Pyka has been cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly the world’s largest electric cargo aircraft in controlled US air space. 

Pelican Spray is a fully autonomous and 100% electric agricultural aircraft with zero emissions. The fixed-wing aircraft weighs 1,125 pounds and was just approved for commercial operations across the US, according to Bloomberg, citing comments from the operating officer and co-founder Chuma Ogunwole. 

Pyka’s new technology eliminates the need for aviation fuel, thus reducing operating costs for farmers and providing substantial environmental benefits. The drone can provide round-the-clock spraying due to its automation capabilities. It has already proven a huge success for Costa Rica, Honduras, and Brazil farmers. 

Pyka, founded in 2017, is already selling the spraying version of the drone. Other versions include Pelican Cargo, which can carry 400 lbs of payload up to 200 miles. 

This comes as the FAA prepares for the first crewed flying taxi flights by 2027. 

Bloomberg pointed out:

Getting FAA authorization for passenger aircrafts is a long and difficult process and a significant hurdle for the electric aviation industry. 

The main challenge to electrifying commercial passenger aviation, though, is the limitations of battery technology that make it infeasible to fly any meaningful distance with multiple passengers onboard.

The US military purchased more electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft this week. 

Potential uses of unmanned and manned drones, in fixed-wing or eVTOL configurations, are set to soar by the decade’s end.