Progressive Fascism

Not that style alone reveals much, of course, but one might wonder why Socialism is written with a capital letter, and capitalism is not. This stylistic distinction tempts one to think of the parallelism in writing God with a capital letter, but the devil in lower case.

There’s something charmingly quaint about the leftists’ continuing attack on capitalism, which is a type of economic order that, if it ever existed at all in this country, has not existed in recognizable form since the 1920s — in a more plausible assessment, not since the years before World War I. Yet the so-called progressives never tire of beating the long-dead horse of capitalism. Are they so ideologically blind that they cannot see how governments at every level have intervened and intervened again until they have displaced or distorted every element of the economic order that might once have contributed to its capitalist character? We live, as F. A. Hayek observed as long ago as 1935, not in a market system, but in a situation of interventionist chaos, where virtually every market is so hog-tied by regulations, laws, and taxes or so artificially pumped up by subsidies, regulatory advantages, and tax loopholes that virtually nothing remains pure and unsullied by the filthy hand of the interventionist state. We inhabit, as we have for nearly a century, a blessed “mixed economy.” What’s this ongoing nonsense about the failure of capitalism? Before anything can fail, it must first exist.

Progressive Fascism

The Antidote for Inauguration Hangover

get a grip...

The Antidote for Inauguration Hangover

Pentagon cleared of propaganda violations

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) — An internal investigation has cleared the Pentagon of violating a ban on domestic propaganda by using retired military officers to comment positively about the war in Iraq in the US media.

In a report posted on its website Friday, the Pentagon's inspector general said "we found the evidence insufficient to conclude that RMA (retired military analysts) outreach activities were improper."

The report said the controversy, which erupted in April following an expose in the New York Times, warranted no further investigation.

Pentagon cleared of propaganda violations

Blowback: Unholy war culture

an excerpt from the 12/08/08 article by Arnaud de Borchgrave

It all goes back to the clandestine war the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan fought together against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89). The coalition's secret weapon: Islam and the cult of jihad.

In the early stages of the Soviet invasion and occupation, many of the Soviet troops were drawn from the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. It was a colonial configuration: brown faces with white officers.

The anti-Soviet resistance, funded by the United States and Saudi Arabia to the tune of $1 billion a year (which was real money in those days), flooded towns occupied by the Soviets with Korans and pamphlets declaring jihad, or holy war, against the Russian occupier.

Blowback: Unholy war culture