Peregrinating
2019

June

1 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

These people actually see it as an act of dictatorship to disagree with them. They feel entitled not just to be free from the imposition of physical force, as we all should feel. They feel entitled to be free from having to live in a world where anyone disagrees with them. Which explains the tyrannical, nasty, abusive and authoritarian attitude that most leftists display.
My question: If they want President Trump deposed by any means necessary merely because he likes conservative commentators, what do they have in store for his supporters?
We’re not going away. And if President Trump gets a second term, just imagine the tantrums to follow. - How Snowflakes Define a “Dictator”, Michael J. Hurd

2 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

In his devastatingly prophetic book, Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell points out that one reason why it is possible for those in authority to maintain the barbarities of the police state is that nobody is able to recall the many blessings of the period which preceded that type of society. In a general way this is also true of the peoples of the Western world today. The great majority of them have known only a world ravaged by war, depressions, international intrigues and meddling, vast debts and crushing taxation, the encroachments of the police state, and the control of public opinion and government by ruthless and irresponsible propaganda. A major reason why there is no revolt against such a state of society as that in which we are living today is that many have come to accept it as a normal matter of course, having known nothing else during their lifetimes.

The methods followed by the various groups interested in blacking out the truth about world affairs since 1932 are numerous and ingenious, but, aside from subterranean persecution of individuals, they fall mainly into the following patterns or categories: (1) excluding scholars suspected of revisionist views from access to public documents which are freely opened to "court historians" and other apologists for the foreign policy of President Roosevelt; (2) intimidating publishers of books and periodicals, so that even those who might wish to publish books and articles setting forth the revisionist point of view do not dare to do so; (3) ignoring or obscuring published material which embodies revisionist facts and arguments; and (4) smearing revisionist authors and their books.

3 June
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Springerville, AZ

4 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

5 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

6 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

However, because war is disproportionately between neighboring countries, which are also disproportionately likely to be trade partners, one would expect trade relations and war to tend to be associated with each other. It does appear, at least from anecdotal impressions, that modern nations that are trade partners fight more often than those that are not. Presumably that’s partly because the apparent correlation of trade with fighting is really just because both trade and fighting are in turn correlated with propinquity; and partly, too, because trade often gives rise to disputes. Even for nations that aren’t neighbors, the biggest modern wars have pitted trade partners against each other.

Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world…. Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.

7 June
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Springerville, AZ

8 June
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Springerville, AZ

9 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

In mid-April, 1939, the United States fleet, which had been moved to the Atlantic three months earlier, was suddenly ordered by the President to return to the Pacific...In April, 1940, the fleet was moved in its entirety to Hawaii for the conduct of the annual maneuvers. Although the fleet's plans called for a return to the West Coast in early May, orders were given to postpone the return for two weeks. Before that period expired, the fleet was assigned to Pearl Harbor for an indefinite period...The naval movements could be interpreted only as efforts to coerce Japan or as preparations for actual hostilities. For the most part the initiative for these movements did not originate in the Navy Department but with the President and the State Department. In the case of the shifting of the fleet base to Pearl Harbor, both the Commander in Chief of the fleet, Admiral Richardson, and Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, were in opposition. Richardson was also critical of any stick-waving at Japan which might end in hostilities. He argued that Pearl Harbor was not adequately equipped and that the Japanese knew that the American forces were not sufficiently supported with auxiliary ships to conduct offensive operations. Another factor, generally overlooked, was that, in the 1938 fleet maneuvers, the aircraft carrier Saratoga had launched a successful surprise attack on Pearl Harbor from a position only a hundred miles away.

In the year following the [Lansing-Ishii Agreement (November 2, 1917)], when the anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States reached high tide, Lansing shrewdly remarked:

I have little patience with these people who are forever on the verge of hysterics about the deep and wicked schemes of Japan. They imagine some of the most preposterous things and report them as facts. I would be inclined to think that some of these enemies of Japan were mentally unbalanced but for their sanity on all other subjects. Unfortunately, they are listened to by many Americans whose reason ought to warn them against believing such tales without better evidence.

10 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

News Flash: Harvard biology students say that the phrase “white corpuscles” is racist, and demand that it be changed to “indigenous peoples corpuscles.” The head of the Ethnic Studies department said he welcomed the move, and would appoint a committee of students to find out how to spell it.

In these twenty years [1932-1952] a revolution took place in the relationship between government and people. Formerly government was the responsibility of people; now people were the responsibility of government.
This change was silently geared to the popular idea of Social Security, for which the money was to come from a law of compulsory thrift imposed upon the individual and a payroll tax imposed upon employers, all to be managed by a paternal Federal government. But this Social Security is delusive. In the first place, you have no surety that the money the government takes currently out of your income or your wage envelope as a social security tax will be worth as much when you get it back as it was when the government took it. Indeed, it is now worth only half as much as it was when the government began to take it a few years ago. With one hand it held out the apple; with the other hand it introduced the worm that was going to devour it. The worm was inflation. Secondly, as fast as the government receives these social security taxes it spends the money and puts in place of it a paper promise to pay you when you are entitled to receive it back, so that the only security behind all this Social Security scheme is more government debt. The right way would be to meet the cost of Social Security currently by an annual tax on the national income.

11 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

In a statement read to his cabinet late in 1931, after Japan had moved its military forces into Manchuria, President Hoover enunciated a policy explicitly rejecting a program of collective sanctions put forward by his Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson. Said Mr. Hoover:

Neither our obligations to China, nor our own interest, nor our dignity require us to go to war over these questions. These acts do not imperil the freedom of the American people, the economic or moral future of our people. I do not propose ever to sacrifice American life for anything short of this. . . We will not go along on war or any of the sanctions, either economic or military, for those are the roads to war.

Unsurprisingly, then, sanctions often help inadvertently to legitimize sanctioned governments. Many Bozarkians may resent various choices made by their rulers. However, sanctions make them suffer. The imposition of sanctions—even in putative response to their government's misdeeds—would quite reasonably seem like bullying. Many Bozarkians might tribalistically identify with their government, which is, after all, made up of fellow Bozarkians. Seeing their country and even their government as being victimized by the United States, they would likely push back. More than that, they could be expected to rally around their leaders as their representative in the context of the crisis created by the sanctions.

12 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

The US crackdown on Chinese tech giant Huawei reinforces the understanding of Chinese society that the US did not simply intend to address the trade imbalance but also wanted to deal a heavy blow to China's high-tech development capability and further contain China's development. The maximum pressure imposed by the US has also generated a serious sense of crisis among the Chinese people.
If China compromises, that means it renders the US the right to define and reshape future China-US relations at will. The US would resort to maximum pressure as a means to make hegemonic demands at China, a catastrophe for China's national security.
Washington often claims that China's development model poses a threat, while the Chinese people tend to think that the US elite do not accept China's development based on its current strength.
The US should understand that China's rapid development is driven by the wish of the Chinese people to live a better life. US containment of China's development, in essence, restricts the right of the Chinese people to improve their lives. If the US links the trade war with China to its suppression of the Chinese people's wishes, it is a dangerous confrontation with the collective right of the Chinese people. - Source

13 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

Competing nations must be just as amazed as Rome's neighbors at America's seemingly unquenchable drive to self-destruct via the in-fighting of entrenched elites and the battle for supremacy between various parasitic elites who hold the power and privilege to squander the nation's resources on needless self-destructive wars of choice and on domestic in-fighting...
An empire weakened by self-inflicted internal conflicts may appear mighty, but it becomes increasingly vulnerable to an external shock.

14 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

15 June
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Springerville, AZ

16 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

The impasse which an unreasonable or paranoid definition of national security may produce is illustrated currently in the case of the United States. According to current policy, our national security demands military bases around the world and elaborate military establishments off the shores or on the frontier of other nations. Perhaps no one will question the purely military advantage of such a program. However, its implications must be considered from the viewpoint of other nations. It is solemnly affirmed that these provisions are for defense only, and any person, party, or foreign nation that fails to take our word for this intent is roundly abused and is accused of aggressive designs upon us. Now I am personally satisfied that no considerable element in the population, and probably few important leaders in the United States, are consciously intent on aggression or the conquest of other nations. It is impossible to see, however, why foreign nations should take this view of the matter and accept our word as an adequate assurance of our intent. The failure of some foreign nations to take our word at its face value in this respect is regarded with pained surprise. The feeling seems to be that our pacific intentions are self-evident or that, in any event, our past record and present reputation should be sufficient guarantee of the purely defensive nature of our policies.

Unfortunately, the historical record and the reputation support precisely the contrary thesis—a fact that may be regrettable but which must, nevertheless, be conceded by anyone not hopelessly in the toils of ethnocentric delusions.

A president who cannot entrust the people with the truth betrays a certain lack of faith in the basic tenets of democracy. But because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests.

17 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

(1) What would be the situation if all nations should adopt our own view as to what their national security demands?
(2) Has our security increased as a result of the last war and the policies of which it was the result?
(3) Is our national security likely to be increased even under the most optimistic probable outcome of present policies?

18 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

With secularism’s triumph, we Americans have no common religion, no common faith, no common font of moral truth. We disagree on what is right and wrong, moral and immoral.

Without an agreed-upon higher authority, values become matters of opinion. And ours are in conflict and irreconcilable.

Understood. But how, then, do we remain one nation and one people?

This is also China's warning to the outside world: Do not imagine you can use maximum pressure to defeat China. After more than a year of the trade war, Chinese people have psychologically prepared themselves to know that some problems just cannot be resolved...

What China should do is to take all measures to stabilize its own economy, release more potential to promote development and wait for the US to return from being extreme to a relatively normal state. - Source

19 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

Ray and Bob, two government maintenance guys, were standing at the base of a flagpole, looking up. A woman walked by and asked what they were doing.

"We're supposed to find the height of the flagpole,'' said Bob, "But we don't have a ladder." The woman said, "Hand me that wrench out of your toolbox." She loosened a few bolts, and then laid the pole down. She then took a tape measure from their toolbox, took a measurement and announced, "Eighteen feet, six inches" and walked away.

Ray shook his head and laughed. "Well, ain't that just like a 'Miss-know-it-all' woman?" he said. "We need the height and she gives us the length!"

Ray and Bob are still working for the government. But now they're congressmen.

20 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

The first three planks of the [1932] Democratic Party platform read as follows:
We advocate:
1 . An immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus and eliminating extravagance, to accomplish a saving of not less than 25 per cent in the cost of Federal government.
2. Maintenance of the national credit by a Federal budget annually balanced.
3. A sound currency to be maintained at all hazards.

Mr. Roosevelt pledged himself to be bound by this platform as no President had ever before been bound by a party document. All during the campaign he supported it with words that could not possibly be misunderstood.

The broken party platform, as an object, had a curious end. Instead of floating away and out of sight as a proper party platform should, it kept coming back with the tide. Once it came so close that the President had to notice it. Then all he did was to turn it over, campaign side down, with the words: "I was able, conscientiously, to give full assent to this platform and to develop its purpose in campaign speeches. A campaign, however, is apt to partake so much of the character of a debate and the discussion of individual points that the deeper and more permanent philosophy of the whole plan (where one exists) is often lost."

21 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

In the welfare state the government undertakes to see to it that the individual shall be housed and clothed and fed according to a statistical social standard, and that he shall be properly employed and entertained, and in consideration for this security the individual accepts in place of entire freedom a status and a number and submits his life to be minded and directed by an all-responsible government.

Americans now are of three kinds, namely: those who are very unhappy about what has happened in one lifetime to their world—to its morals, principles and ways of thinking—and have intuitions of a dire sequel; those who only now begin to read the signs and are seized with premonitions of disaster; and three, those who like it.

It is impossible to say what proportion any one of these three divisions bears to the total. It is impossible, furthermore, at any moment of time to say what the people want or don't want. They probably do not know. And what they say may be so like writing on the sand that a tide not of their making will wipe it out.

The forms of republican government survive; the character of the state has changed.

Formerly the people supported government and set limits to it and minded their own lives.

Now they pay for unlimited government, whether they want it or not, and the government minds their lives—looking to how they are fed and clothed and housed; how they provide for their old age; how the national income, which is the product of their own labor, shall be divided among them; how they shall buy and sell; how long and how hard and under what conditions they shall work, and how equity shall be maintained between the buyers of food who dwell in the cities and the producers of food who live on the soil. For the last named purpose it resorts to a system of subsidies, penalties and compulsions, and assumes with medieval wisdom to fix the just price.

22 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

They have developed their own bewildering vocabulary filled with made-up words and illogical concepts to describe the world in a way that fits their desires and supports their accusations.
Conservatives don't live in this world and frankly, we don't ever want to. To them we are heretics, or barbarians. In their eyes we are the dirty untouchables, the “deplorables”. We cannot be saved, and should be destroyed. Zealots always seek to treat ideological outsiders as mortal enemies even when those individuals have done nothing to them. The fact is, most modern political crimes and genocides have been enacted in the name of socialist ideals; in the name of concepts the left holds dear. We continue to suffer under these ideals in the name of globalism.

All with one impulse people rush to seize the gold itself as the only reality left—not only people as individuals; banks, also, and the great banking systems and governments do it, in competition with people. This is the financial crisis. All of it has happened. It was not the gold standard that did it; it was breaking faith with the gold standard that did it, and the case would be the same if the standard were anything else.

23 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

24 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

For the writers who gain the widest fame and favor with the public in any given period are the writers who do the best job of reflecting back to that public whatever are its own major preoccupations—the ideas, the dreams, the notions of what things in life are the most and least important, most and least worthy of a person's attention and concern...

It is notable that what one finds in their writings one can still find in the work of most libertarians today. In fact, it could be argued that the modern libertarian movement has more in common with conservatives of the 30s and 40s than do contemporary conservatives. The ideas of the Old Right conservatives (skepticism of government planning, isolationist foreign policy and a general belief in the free market) have taken a back seat to the modern conservative emphasis on domestic pragmatism and international interventionism.

25 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

26 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

A person would think that a government would be protective of such an advantage and not encourage foreigners to abandon dollars. But the US government, reckless in its arrogance, hubris, and utter ignorance, has done all in its power to cause flight from the dollar. The US government uses the dollar-based financial system to coerce other countries to accommodate American interests at their expense. Sanctions on other countries, threats of sanctions, asset freezes and confiscations, and so forth have driven large chunks of the world—Russia, China, India, Iran—into non-dollar transactions that reduce the demand for dollars. Threats against Europeans for purchasing Russian energy and Chinese technology products are alienating elements of Washington’s European empire. A country with the massive indebtedness of the US government would quickly be reduced to Third World status if the value of the dollar collapsed from lack of demand.

27 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

28 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - More than half Chinese consumers have avoided buying anything made in the United States in support of their country in an escalating trade war, a survey suggests, posing a “significant” risk to U.S. companies.

The poll, conducted by London-based advisory firm Brunswick which surveyed 1,000 Chinese consumers, said 56% of respondents had said they had avoided U.S. products, while 68% said their opinion of American firms had become more negative. - Source

29 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ

In closing, I’ll share just two more final observations from my travels and they are these: Many, if not most, Americans are fat and they act as if they are somehow entitled. I wonder if they’ll ever realize how good we’ve had it over the past several decades. I fear they will soon. - Doug “Uncola” Lynn

30 June
Springerville RV
Springerville, AZ