An independent Europe will never happen if the American Empire has anything to say about it.

From Patrick Foy at lewrockwell.com:

Seeing what’s in front of your nose demands a constant struggle. —George Orwell

I’m in Munich, my favorite European city, if I throw out Venice. Is Venice actually a city? At one time it was the center of a vast Mediterranean empire. It strikes me as more of a sprawling, open-air museum frozen in time. I just left there. It was, as always, wonderful.

There is a serious problem with Munich. It is under constant construction and reorganization. The inner city was bombed to smithereens in the Second World War and had to be rebuilt from scratch. That project continues through force of habit.

Another annoyance: I invariably begin the day by digesting my two least favorite establishment media outlets—the Financial Times and the NY Times—while having breakfast. The hotel provides them free of charge. What can one do?

I owe it to myself to keep up-to-date with Washington’s Big Cons which run simultaneously and nonstop, e.g., Ukraine, China, Russia, Iran, Israel, etc. The FT print edition is available in Munich. I love print. At home, I’m stuck with the internet.

Simply put, the Big Cons are the trumpeted false narratives that:

(a) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked,

(b) China wants to invade Taiwan and threatens the peace of the world,

(c) Russia is an enduring enemy of the West,

(d) Iran is building an atomic bomb to nuke Israel and must be stopped,

(e) Israel is an innocent, peace-loving ally of America worthy of unlimited support.

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(Vassal = a holder of land by feudal tenure on conditions of homage and allegiance)

NZ Doctor Appealing Suspension for Covid ‘Misinformation’.

On Wednesday, 28 June, Dr Alison Goodwin’s appeal against the decision of the Medical Council of New Zealand (MCNZ) to suspend her Annual Practicing Certificate (APC) will be heard. Dr Goodwin is appealing the extreme decision on the basis that it breached her right to freedom of expression and was an overreach of the MCNZ’s power.  The case will be heard in Wellington District Court, 49 Ballance Street, starting at 10:00 am. A rally of public support is expected. (Please meet before 10am). [The Stuffers are sure to make a thing of it; no-one may criticise their idols: Hipkins/HER/Bloomfield/Pinky/Baker, etc. —Eds]

Despite no patient complaints, no evidence of harm being caused, and without considering that she may have helped people, the MCNZ suspended Dr. Goodwin’s APC and later imposed conditions detailing what she could say in public and restricting what she could prescribe to treat patients with Covid-19.

The Haps

ACT is on fire! In Parliament and in media. ACT led the debate all week on the racist Waitlist Equity Adjuster tool, Oranga Tamariki abuse, and Michael Wood’s bizarre resignation. Our colleagues in the Nats rounded out the week by coming out in support of various ACT crime policies, showing the Parties can work together around an agenda set by ACT. If you are a Free Press reader you are a core ACT supporter, and we thank you for your support.

Public Service bloat

Crime is now the number two issue this election according to voters. ACT was onto the issue before it was popular, because it heard from those affected at close quarters. The Party’s policies from last year would remove the target of 30 per cent less prisoners, set up a fund for victims, and remove state funding of pre-sentencing reports. This year’s Alternative Budget allowed serious money for increased youth and adult imprisonment.

However the number one issue is now the cost of living. People up and down the country are not just having trouble making ends meet, they are furious. They’ve done the right thing, they’re careful, but there is too much month left at the end of the money.

Part of the problem is the sheer recklessness of Grant Robertson, which we’ll talk about, but also the long term problem with productivity. People can’t afford the things they need because production in New Zealand doesn’t equal the first world consumption people would like to enjoy here.

That last point is borne out in the Current Account Deficit. At 8.1 per cent of GDP, last quarter had the second equal worst CAD since records began in 1988. The other two worst quarters were the two quarters immediately before the last quarter.

Some of that deficit is Government borrowing. $10 billion last year, $7 billion this year, $7.5 billion forecast for next year. COVID is over but the New Zealand Government’s books don’t look like it. Yet, the economy has gone into recession despite the massive injection of borrowed Government cash. Robertson really is running out of options.

As David Seymour put to Grant Robertson in Select Committee last week, the amount of money spent by the Government is up 25 per cent. That’s per person, adjusted for inflation (which has been considerable). What measurable improvements has Grant demanded from the public service for this 25 per cent increase in spending?

Astonishingly he could not give a single example. “Well,” he could have said, “the streets are safer.” Or maybe something about reduced hospital waiting lists or better roads or more kids learning more stuff at school, or greater access to medicines and mental health.

That the Government is spending 25 per cent more and can’t say what it’s delivering should have been the biggest media story of the week. For familiar reasons it wasn’t, that’s why we have Free Press.

The same week the New Zealand Initiative released another excellent Bryce Wilkinson report Public Service Bloat. Among other things it points out that “The number of public servants… was 28% higher than in June 2017. The economy-wide employment increase was 12%. This 28% rise even understates the increase in the employment of people in public service activities. Central government spending on consultants was $1.25 billion in 2022. To put that in perspective, core Crown spending on personnel in 2021-22 was just under $10 billion.”

It goes on to make the same points made above, in greater detail. It compares the social outcomes in New Zealand with those in similar countries. Taxpayers are not getting the outcomes for the spending, which is why Grant Robertson couldn’t answer David Seymour’s question.

Another interesting piece of data last week came from former Reserve Bank economist and current blogging curmudgeon Michael Reddell. His basic point is that New Zealand is exhibiting the downside of an island nation. Busy with itself and not engaging competitively with the world. He says:

“Non-tradables real per capita output has still been running well above trend, consistent with an overheated economy (high inflation, large current account deficit), as we’d seen on a smaller scale in the mid 00s. But the proxy for the real per capita output of the tradables sector hasn’t yet recovered much at all, and is only about 10 per cent higher than it was 32 years ago… …It is an increasingly inward-focused economy, where policy (such as it is) is only tending to reinforce such developments. It doesn’t have the feel of the foundations for a prosperous and highly productive economy for New Zealanders – this generations, or our children and grandchildren.”

In other words, too much money wasted by Government, spent on houses, and tied up in compliance activity that doesn’t actually produce any goods or services to sell. No country can consume more than it produces. Not sustainably, anyway.

That’s why ACT’s agenda of shrinking Government tax, borrowing, spending, and regulating is essential for future generations. The alternative is the continuing inward focus that grew under Helen Clark, steadied under John Key, then took off again under Jacinda Ardern.

ACT is campaigning for a New Zealand where it’s safe to go to the shop, and you can afford what you need when you get there. That will require real change, just trimming the sails won’t be enough.

The Democrat regime’s policies have been almost as bad as those of the Labour regime in NZ

from the LA Times

Large swaths of residents are considering packing up and leaving. Many also believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction, and are anxious about the direction of the economy and their ability to pay their bills.

The findings of a new poll from a consortium of local nonprofits aiming to take stock of the state’s mood point to a contradiction playing out across the Golden State: People are pleased by the bounty the country’s largest state had to offer and mostly favor its liberal attitudes on social issues, but are also far more concerned about their livelihoods than last year.

Nearly half of those surveyed (46%) said they struggle to save money or pay for unexpected expenses even as they scrape by — a jump of 6 percentage points since April 2022 when residents were asked the same question. About 35% said they live comfortably and 18% said they find it difficult to make ends meet every month.

More than 40% of residents say they’re contemplating moving out of California, with nearly half of them saying they’re considering that “very seriously.” About 61% pointed to the high cost of living here as the reason they’d go. People of color are far more likely to say that the expense of living in California is the reason they might leave. About 71% of residents who are either Black or Asian/Pacific Islander and considering relocating cited the cost of living.

Full article

Tax people too much and they’ll vote with their feet when they see government taxes being squandered on things that are unproductive. Our prediction is that if the present government in NZ is re-elected in October, about the same percentage will consider moving to Australia or elsewhere.

by Caitlin Johnstone

There’s a frenzied rush by the Australian political/media class to both propagandise Australians as quickly as possible into supporting preparations for war with China, and to ram through legislation that facilitates the censorship of online speech.

Australia’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is set to release draft legislation imposing hefty fines on social media companies who fail to adequately block “misinformation” and “disinformation” from circulation in Australia, a frightening prospect which will likely have far-reaching consequences for political speech in the nation.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

Under the proposed laws, the authority would be able to impose a new “code” on specific companies that repeatedly fail to combat misinformation and disinformation or an industry-wide “standard” to force digital platforms to remove harmful content.

The maximum penalty for systemic breaches of a registered code would be $2.75 million or 2 per cent of global turnover — whichever is higher.

The maximum penalty for breaching an industry standard would be $6.88 million, or 5 per cent of a company’s global turnover. In the case of Facebook’s owner, Meta, for example, the maximum penalty could amount to a fine of more than $8 billion.

Those are the kinds of numbers that change a company’s censorship protocols. We’re already seeing social media censorship of content in Australia that the Australian government has ruled unacceptable; here’s what the tweets embedded in a right-wing article about Twitter censorship looks like when you try to view them on Twitter from Australia, for example:

These tweets were reportedly hidden from Australians on the platform at the behest of the Australian government. Australians could wind up seeing much more of this sort of Australia-specific censorship from social media platforms if this “misinformation” legislation goes through. Or they could just start censoring it for everyone.

The problem with laws against inaccurate information is of course that somebody needs to be making the determination what information is true and what is false, and those determinations will necessarily be informed by the biases and agendas of the person making them. I can substantiate my claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by NATO powers using an abundance of facts and evidence, for example, but there’s still a sizeable portion of the population which would consider such claims malignant disinformation with or without the supporting data.

When the government involves itself in the regulation of speech, it is necessarily incentivized to regulate speech in a way that benefits itself and its allies. Nobody who supports government regulation of online mis- and disinformation can articulate how such measures can be safeguarded in a surefire way against the abuses and agendas of the powerful.

Under a Totalitarian Regime, your government censors your speech if you say unauthorized things. Under a ‘Free Democracy’, your government orders corporations to censor your speech if you say unauthorized things.

At the same time, Australian media have been hammering one remarkably uniform message into public consciousness with increasing aggression lately: there is a war with China coming, Australia will be involved, and Australia must do much more to prepare for this war as quickly as possible.

Australians are remarkably vulnerable to propaganda due to the fact that ownership of our nation’s media is the most concentrated in the western world, with a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment and Murdoch’s News Corp controlling most of the Australian press.

Both of these media conglomerates have been involved in the latest excuse to talk about how more military spending and militarisation is needed, this time taking the form of a war machine-funded think tanker publishing a book about how we all need to prepare for war with China.

Nine Entertainment’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have an article out titled “Military expert warns of ‘very serious risk’ of China war within five years” by the odious Matthew Knott, who is best known for being told to drum himself out of Australian journalism by former prime minister Paul Keating for his appalling war-with-China propaganda series published earlier this year by the same papers. Readers who follow Australian media would do well to remember Knott’s name, because he has become one of the most prolific war propagandists in the western press.

The “military expert” who warns of the need to prepare for an imminent war with China is a man named Ross Babbage, who as Knott notes is “a non-resident senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.” What Knott fails to disclose to his readers is that the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is funded by every war profiteer and war machine entity under the sun, the majority coming straight from the US Department of Defense itself.

As we’ve discussed many times previously, it is never, ever okay for the press to cite war machine-funded think tankers for expertise or analysis on matters of war and foreign policy, and it is doubly egregious for them to do so without at least disclosing their massive conflict of interest to their readers. This act of extreme journalistic malpractice has become the norm throughout the mainstream press, because it helps mass media reporters do their actual job: administering propaganda to an unsuspecting public.

The Murdoch press has also been using Babbage’s book release as an excuse to bang the drums of war, with multiple Sky News segments and articles with titles like “Military analyst Ross Babbage warns Australia of potential war with China in coming years,” “National security expert Ross Babbage warns ‘strong possibility’ of war with China in latest book,” and “‘Running out of time’: Xi may move on Taiwan in next few years.” Again, not one mention of Babbage’s conflict of interests.

All for a news story that (and I cannot stress this enough) is not a news story. A war machine-funded think tanker saying he wants more war is not a news story — it’s just a thing that happens when the war machine is allowed to pay people to be warmongers.

“War Machine-Funded Warmonger Wants More War.” That’s your headline. That’s the one and only headline this non-story could ever deserve, if any.

Propaganda and censorship are the two most important tools of imperial narrative control, and it’s very telling that Australia is ramping them both up as the nation is being transformed into a weapon for the US empire to use against China.

Steps are being taken to ensure that the Australian populace will be on board with whatever agendas the empire has planned for us in the coming years, and judging from what we’re seeing right now, it isn’t going to be pretty.

by Bob Brockie

A week ot two back, two American psychologists launched their scientific article with the following quote: “The social fabric appears to be unravelling. Civility seems like an old-fashioned habit, honesty and trust like a relic from a former time . . . The foundations of moral life have collapsed, concluding with the dark dawning of the modern day”.  The psychologists then tell us that the Roman historian Pliny wrote this 2,000 years ago. 

In Nature journal, Professors Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert report on their massive surveys of over 12 million people in sixty countries, asking about moral decline. They find that over 80% of people think the world is ‘going to the dogs’.

The psychologists analysed millions of opinions gathered over earlier decades, and millions more opinions of present-day Americans. Many were asked: “How often have you carried shopping bags, or suitcases for a stranger? Have you recently helped somebody across a street?   Have you given directions to a tourist?  Were you treated with respect yesterday, or in the past? How would you rate moral behaviour with that 10, 20, 30 years ago?” Participants were asked about their thoughts on changing goodness, kindness, honesty, and respect. 

The scientists found that nearly everybody thought their own moral behaviour and that of their contemporaries was beyond reproach. Other people were the problem, especially the younger generation.  Pessimism was shared equally by country, race, age, sex, religion, educational level, and parental status. 

Is there any truth in this? 

The professors suggest that two biases skew people’s thoughts — faulty memory and media negativity. Many studies show that people are quite selective in their memories, remembering positive events from their past but forgetting negative memories.  As a result, they’re inclined to remember a rosy past and compare it with today’s supposed wasteland.  Old Livy certainly felt so. 

 The media is also partly to blame because the public seek bad news and not very interested in good news. The mass media indulge this tendency by focusing on public crises and people behaving badly. “If it bleeds, it reads” is an old newspaper adage 

The professors conclude that the idea of moral decline is an illusion. 

In reality, people are  becoming more civilised.   Fellow American psychologist Steven Pinker shows that the scale of wars, slaughter, subjugation, slavery, cruelty, torture, murder, and rape, have all declined over the world in the long and short term, while minorities, women, and animals are better respected than they once were.  

The illusion of declining morality may have disturbing results. Governments and churches could waste scarce resources trying to reverse an imaginary trend. 

Bob Brockie reporting on: Adam Mastroianni & Daniel Gilbert. The Illusion of moral declne. Nature. 7 June 2023

Biden slowly realizing that they’re playing India’s National Anthem and not America’s. pic.twitter.com/DsqET3fGnN

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) June 22, 2023

WATCH: Joe Biden refuses to let go of the Indian prime minister's hand making things awkward for Jill Biden. pic.twitter.com/mkNeCucvft

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 22, 2023

During a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House on Thursday, Joe Biden stumbled around holding the guy’s hand while appearing perpetually confused.

In one hilarious moment, the pair stood for the playing of their respective county’s national anthems. When the band began to play, Biden raised his hand to his heart, but then slowly realised they were playing the Indian anthem, not the U.S. one.

Adding to the complete cringe, Biden then lowered his hand bit by bit, as if no one would notice.

During a ‘press conference’, Biden took two scripted questions and read the answers from notes in front of him:

Video clips here

from the New York Post

On Tuesday morning, an e-bike battery exploded in a Chinatown repair shop.

The ensuing fire killed four people who lived above the store, and injured two others — elderly people who had nothing to do with the facility. 

The latest victims bring the death toll from e-mobility “device” fires this year to 13 — and to 23 since 2021.

E-bike blazes — caused when the massive amount of energy stored in substandard batteries spontaneously ignites — are the leading cause of fire death in New York City. 

Read the rest