[The Future of The Freedom Foundation] Hand it to the Chinese and Cubans for exposing the utter hypocrisy of the U.S. national-security state, its empire of foreign military bases, and its foreign policy of interventionism.
Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that China is paying Cuba billions of dollars in return for permitting China to construct a major facility in Cuba to spy on the United States.
China and Cuba deny the deal but what is so funny has been the reaction of U.S interventionists. They are going ballistic over China’s supposedly aggressive behavior.
Florida Senator Marc Rubio expressed the sentiments of all U.S. interventionists by exclaiming, "The threat to America from #Cuba isn’t just real, it is far worse than this." Rubio and U.S. Senator Mark Warner from Virginia jointly stated, "We are deeply disturbed by reports that Havana and Beijing are working together to target the United States and our people. The United States must respond to China’s ongoing and brazen attacks on our nation’s security."
[Future of the Freedom Foundation] Back in January, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced that mortgage fees for some borrowers would increase beginning May 1, while other borrowers would see their fees decrease.
The FHFA is an independent federal agency that "was established by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA) and is responsible for the effective supervision, regulation, and housing mission oversight of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), and the Federal Home Loan Bank System, which includes the 11 Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBanks) and the Office of Finance (OF)."
The agency’s mission is to ensure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which buy about two-thirds of the mortgages originated by U.S. lenders — and the FHLBanks "fulfill their mission by operating in a safe and sound manner to serve as a reliable source of liquidity and funding for housing finance and community investment." These three entities together "provide more than $8.1 trillion in funding for the U.S. mortgage markets and financial institutions."
As the May 1 date approached, Republicans began complaining that the mortgage fee hike would force homebuyers with good credit to pay more for their mortgages to offset lower fees charged to those with riskier credit.
Two House Republican leaders even wrote a letter to FHFA director Sandra Thompson demanding that the Biden administration eliminate the fee hikes or else Republicans would "take action to repeal them legislatively and reconsider the parameters of FHFA’s authority."
In the Senate, Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) penned a letter as well. He termed the new fee structure a "shortsighted and counterproductive policy" that "demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the necessity of accurately tailoring housing finance products to credit risk and establishes a perverse incentive that punishes hardworking Americans for their fiscal prudence."
The fees in question are loan-level price adjustments (LLPAs) — risk-based fees assessed to mortgage borrowers depending on their credit score, loan-to-value, debt-to-income, loan purpose, occupancy, down payment, and mortgage type.
[The Future of the Freedom Foundation] Three days ago — June 10 — was the 60th anniversary of President Kennedy’s Peace Speech at American University. Reading or listening to the speech today, it is not difficult to see why the U.S. national-security establishment deemed Kennedy to be a grave threat to national security, just as it did with certain foreign leaders, such as Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz and, later, President Salvador Allende of Chile.
For some 150 years, the federal government had been a limited-government republic. After World War II, however, the federal government was converted to a national-security state.
The difference was day and night.
With a limited-government republic, there was openness and transparency in governmental operations. Moreover, there was only a relatively small, basic military force. No Pentagon, no vast military-industrial complex, no CIA, no NSA, and no empire of foreign military bases. Governmental powers were limited and tightly constrained. No power to assassinate, kidnap, torture, or indefinitely detain people. No power to initiate coups or regime-change operations in foreign countries. No power of mass secret surveillance.
With a national-security state, dark-side secrecy became everything. "National security" became the two most important words in the American political lexicon. A large, permanent military establishment, along with the CIA and the NSA, came into existence. This vast national-security establishment vested itself with omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers, including assassination, torture, coups, secret surveillance, kidnapping, and indefinite detention. It established a vast empire of military bases, both foreign and domestic, and initiated a program of regime change in foreign nations. Foreign wars in faraway lands, such as Korea and Vietnam, became the norm.
The Cold War was actually one great big racket, one that became a cash cow for the vast military-intelligence complex and its ever-growing army of "defense" contractors who loved feeding at the public trough. This enormous racket was justified under the rubric of keeping America safe from a supposed vast communist conspiracy that supposedly was based in Moscow, Russia. Yes, that Russia!
#1
The Cold War was actually one great big racket, one that became a cash cow for the vast military-intelligence complex and its ever-growing army of “defense” contractors who loved feeding at the public trough. This enormous racket was justified under the rubric of keeping America safe from a supposed vast communist conspiracy that supposedly was based in Moscow, Russia. Yes, that Russia!
#3
Hard for me to believe in Saint John the Kennedy. He was a man with many character flaws and weaknesses. His poor judgement is exemplified in his choice of Lyndon Johnson to be his vice-presidential running mate.
OTOH, this country went off the rails in the 1960s and has yet to get back on track.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
06/17/2023 12:44 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Once upon a time, the "intelligence community" watched a national election get stolen and did something about it.
Now, they help engineer it.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/17/2023 12:46 Comments ||
Top||
#5
I don’t think the Administrative State liked the way that Ike signed off so their main goal was to block Nixon. They accepted JFK with a side order of their main man Johnson. Demonstrably, they have dropped their standards.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
06/17/2023 13:55 Comments ||
Top||
[The Blade of Perseus] Walt Nauta is a 10-year-Navy veteran and served as an aide to former President Trump both in and out of office.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has now indicted him for allegedly "making false statements in interviews with the FBI." The indictment’s subtext is that Nauta refused to cooperate with, and turn state’s evidence to, the special counsel in its efforts to convict the former president.
But why stop the indictments with a man who loyally served and followed the orders of the former president of the United States, was a Navy veteran, and a hard-working immigrant from Guam?
Are there not far bigger fish to fry to remind Americans that justice is blind?
After all, when Special Counsel Smith announced his indictments of Trump, he lectured America on the rule of law and the cherished notion that no one is above it.
So let us start with the former interim director of the FBI itself, Andrew McCabe.
McCabe admittedly lied four times about his illegally leaking sensitive information to witnesses and mishandling classified information.
Have those crimes suddenly ceased being felonies?
Or is it now the policy of the United States government that an FBI director can lie with impunity, and leak, and mishandle sensitive classified information?
Yet Walt Nauta may be sent to prison while McCabe will continue to earn a fine salary at CNN as a paid "expert" to deplore . . . what exactly?
What McCabe knows best from his own experience with the deed—the "mishandling of classified information"?
[PALLADIUM] A casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
#1
Meritocracy is antithetical to DEI and the goals of the demokrat party. Sadly, trust is the first victim of this cascading series of incompetence displays. Its collapse is felt everywhere, exemplified in the level of distrust felt about the "new vaccination" plans for the next "pandemic". As my wife and I concluded on hearing about it, AYFKM?
#2
Some time ago I had projected the idea Collages would be closing, especially liberal Colleges. Now main stream seems to have begun noticing this trend.
#3
The credential mills crank out the sort that wind up as what ZMan calls the "managerial class." They are the unelected bureaucrats that have let the country's infrastructure go down the drain. Now, they spend over $1 million plus per capita on homelessness, but not on homeless people.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/17/2023 18:26 Comments ||
Top||
[American Greatness] fter the world escaped a nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, it has been generally understood that nuclear-armed nations did not publicly threaten their rivals and enemies with thermonuclear weapons.
Of course, there were occasional lunatic exceptions to the rule. Since 2006, when the unhinged North Korean regime acquired nuclear weapons, the world has periodically dismissed the zany threats from the Kim dynasty. Kim Jong Un has sporadically warned he might strike Japan, South Korea, and the United States—usually in an outrageous and outlandish fashion.
Kim finally was warned of the consequences of his brinkmanship rhetoric, most famously by Donald Trump in 2018. He reminded Kim that the American nuclear button was bigger than North Korea’s—an eerie counter-warning that for a time led to the cooling of North Korean rhetoric.
Pakistan went nuclear in 1998. From time to time, its prime ministers have warned India that in any confrontation, what Pakistan lacked in numbers and arms would be made up by the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. But again, Pakistan’s threats, like those of Kim Jong Un’s, were dismissed as the rantings of the insecure and blustering, who were otherwise deterred by much larger nuclear arsenals.
But the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine opened a new chapter in nuclear trash-talking. The Ukrainian war has proved dangerously unique in a variety of ways. True, there have been prior large land wars involving nuclear powers. The first Gulf War of 1991 saw Britain, France, and the United States combine to help crush Iraq without mention of nuclear arms. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 without such threats. Neither did China mention a nuclear option in 1979, despite a less-than-successful short invasion of Vietnam. Nor did Great Britain, in its 1982 retaking of the Falkland Islands, talk of the bomb, although recently declassified documents revealed that the Royal Navy carried 31 nuclear weapons on its expeditionary fleet—presumably depth charges, bombs, and missiles—to the chagrin of the current Argentine government.
Yet the Ukrainian war is the first large conventional war on the very doorstep of a nuclear superpower. And additionally, it has become a proxy war between the nuclear-armed NATO alliance and nuclear Russia.
[American Thinker] Fox News reports that twenty Republicans in the House of Representatives sided with most Democrats in voting against a resolution that would have censured Rep. Adam Schiff, (D-Calif.), for repeatedly peddling the hoax that former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
It is essential to note the names of the 20 Republicans who voted against censuring Schiff.
#3
Massie tweeted something earlier in the week that cited the $16 million fine that was going to go with this motion to censure as his reason for voting no, saying the Dems would just use it against Repub's when they get the House back. Smart move, if you ask me. Last I heard - they're removing the fine and resubmitting the motion to censure.
#4
Massie’s argument about the legislation being unconstitutional could be destroyed by an astute High School freshmen. The wording of the essay would probably be pretty pristine, the internet being what it is.
Although the purpose of legislation was to hold a true bastard accountable, the result of the effort is confirmation of some other bastards, several of which are in leadership. Massie and Davidson need to be neutered at some point. I think Davidson is in the Gang of 8 and will block all DS reforms until he is dumpsterized and lit afire.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
06/17/2023 11:38 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Ah! If so, I understand. Thanks Raj.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
06/17/2023 11:44 Comments ||
Top||
[JP] Bone fragments found in Laotian cave provide new evidence of early failed human expansions out of Africa, according to a study published on June 13.
The peer-reviewed study, which was published in the academic journal Nature Communications, investigated bone fragments found in the Tam Pà Ling cave in Laos. The cave's name means Cave of the Monkeys and has previously been investigated for pre-historic human evidence.
Traditional models for human expansion out of Africa hold to two broad categories, either an early dispersal model in which humans left Africa 130-80,0000 years ago and a later dispersal occurring after this period.
Genomic evidence strongly supported the second theory in which there was rapid dispersal out of Africa around 60-50,000 years ago, which split into two groups one heading to Europe and one heading to South Asia.
There is some genetic evidence showing earlier dispersal in present-day Australasian populations, however, this is not considered significant as it contributed less than 1% of their total genetic makeup.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[JP] Bone fragments found in Laotian cave provide new evidence of early failed human expansions out of Africa, according to a study published on June 13.
