Blenheim Palace is a sprawling mansion near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England, built between 1705 and 1724 to commemorate the Battle of Blenheim won by a combined Anglo-Dutch-Austrian army led by John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, over Louis XIV’s army and Bavarian troops in the War of the Spanish Succession on Aug. 13, 1704. It was at Blenheim Palace 150 years ago on Nov. 30, 1874, that Winston S. Churchill, arguably Britain’s greatest prime minister and arguably the savior of Western civilization during World War II, was born. In the United States, where citizens celebrated the Thanksgiving weekend, the sesquicentennial of Churchill’s birth was mostly ignored, though Larry Arnn wrote a fine piece about Churchill in the New Criterion, and Robert Schmuhl penned an op-ed about the great leader in the Wall Street Journal. William Manchester in his magnificent three-volume biography (the third volume completed by Paul Reid after Manchester’s death) called Winston Churchill the “last lion.” Churchill was, wrote Manchester, “like the lion in Revelation, the ‘first beast,’ with ‘six wings about him’ and ‘full of eyes within.’” The lion in Revelation represents authority, majesty and power. Churchill had all of those, but he also had, in Manchester’s judgment, “intuitive genius” and “inflexible resolution” that enabled him to “gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends.” At the time of Churchill’s birth, Great Britain ruled an empire greater in size than that of Rome or Spain at their zeniths. The British Navy ruled the waves. British statesmen like William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, and later Lord Salisbury, jealously guarded Britain’s role as the “holder” of the European balance of power. But unbeknownst to a young Winston Churchill, the empire’s days were numbered. Three years before Churchill’s birth, Bismarck fought his final war to unify Germany in central Europe, while Romanov Russia continued to challenge Britain in central Asia’s “great game.” Meanwhile, Japan was awakening in Asia and the Pacific, while the United States began, in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s words, “to look outward.” Churchill’s father, Randolph, was an up-and-coming member of the Conservative Party, destined, however, to fall from grace after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer and dying in 1895 at the young age of 45. Winston’s mother was the American Jennie Jerome, who used her intellect and feminine wiles to advance Winston’s career. Neither parent had much personal time for Winston, who was reared by Elizabeth Everest, his nanny. At an early age, Churchill took to playing with soldiers and reading history. History would become Churchill’s lodestar. As a teenager, he believed he was destined to save Britain from extreme peril. As a young man and military officer, he repeatedly sought out danger and fame — in Cuba during the revolt against Spain, in India on the Northwest frontier, and in Africa in the Sudan and later South Africa. His daring escape from the Boers during the war in South Africa helped to launch his political career, which ultimately spanned seven decades. Churchill also wrote books about his adventures. Churchill switched political parties twice in his career, earning the undying suspicion and distrust of parliamentary colleagues. As First Lord of the Admiralty during the early stages of the First World War, Churchill had the fleet ready to transport the British armies to the Western Front to help stop Germany’s advance. Frustrated by the bloody stalemate of the Western Front, Churchill championed the Dardanelles campaign, which turned into a disaster and nearly ruined his political career. The “man of destiny” was sacked and went to the front for several months. When he returned, the war’s tragedies continued, his talents were still needed, and he wound up back in the war cabinet. After the war, Churchill switched parties again and rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he took a knife to the defense budget in the belief that there would be no war in the foreseeable future. He also began writing a history of the Great War called The World Crisis. Churchill intended that history would treat him well, so he wrote the history. As one colleague remarked: “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it The World Crisis.” Churchill speculated in the American stock market and faced financial ruin when the market crashed in 1929. He survived financially on his meager parliamentary salary and his authorship of books and essays. He suffered serious injuries when he was struck by an automobile on the streets of New York in 1931. In the 1930s, Churchill was relegated to the political “wilderness” by leaders of the Conservative Party. As war clouds gathered in Europe and the Pacific, Churchill repeatedly sounded the alarm in parliament and to the world, but in Western capitals, appeasement reigned. Churchill’s warnings of the gathering storm went unheeded until Hitler’s intentions became too clear to ignore. But by then it was too late to avoid the tragedy of global war. Appeasement’s failure led to the British government’s collapse and the king reluctantly summoned Churchill to form a wartime government. It was Britain’s “darkest hour,” and the survival of Western civilization stood in the balance. It was May-June 1940. Britain stood alone against Nazi-dominated Europe aligned with Soviet Russia. Many of Churchill’s colleagues in the war cabinet urged him to negotiate peace with Hitler. Churchill refused to parley with “that man” and pledged to “never surrender.” In those few days, he saved Western civilization from succumbing to all of the horrors of what he called a “new Dark Age.” But he couldn’t prevent all of the horrors — the murder of some six million Jews, the bombing of cities, the atrocities of Nanking, the expansion of the Gulag Archipelago, Soviet control of Eastern Europe, communism’s triumph in China, the coming of the nuclear age. After Germany’s surrender but before victory over Japan, Churchill was turned out of office by the voters. He subsequently wrote his six-volume history of the Second World War, which earned a Nobel Prize for literature. He served another term as prime minister in the early 1950s, but by then he was an old and tired lion. The empire was virtually gone. Britain’s role as the “holder” of the balance of power was assumed by the United States. History is so contingent upon events. No one could have foreseen that the little baby born 150 years ago in Blenheim Palace would someday save our civilization. What would the world be like today if Churchill had been killed on the Northwest frontier, or if he never escaped from the Boers in South Africa? What would the world be like if he had been shot and killed on the Western Front during World War I? What would the world be like if he hadn’t survived the auto accident in New York in 1931? What would the world be like if the king had summoned Lord Halifax, instead of Churchill, on May 10, 1940? In William Manchester’s third volume of The Last Lion, he identifies perhaps Churchill’s greatest quality: courage. He quotes Churchill from Great Contemporaries: “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because … it is the quality which guarantees all the others.” Those of us who live in, and enjoy the culture and values of, Western civilization — or at least what is left of them — owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Winston Churchill. READ MORE: Trump Needs ‘Bismarcks’ to Steer Our Foreign Policy James Burnham: the Sage of Kent, Connecticut The post The Last Lion Born 150 Years Ago appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

RealClearPolitics picked up an utterly asinine column by one of the most insufferable leftist pundits in existence, one Robert B. Reich, which appeared at the left-wing Tampa Bay Times, among other publications. In it, Reich, who at one time held a position as the labor secretary in the Clinton administration and is now a college professor at Berkeley when he isn’t posting gibberish on social media, blasts Elon Musk for having the temerity to believe the federal bureaucracy is bloated and unnecessary. Get a load of this bilge: No one better illustrates the sinister consequences of great wealth turned into unaccountable power than Elon Musk. Musk, the richest person in the world, is not only claiming presidential authority to fire federal workers, but he’s posting the identities of those whose jobs he wants to eliminate — with the clear intention that his followers harass and threaten them so they quit. Musk is utterly unaccountable. He has never been elected to anything, but he spent $120 million helping Trump become the president-elect and is now acting as if he’s Trump’s co-president, calling himself Trump’s “First Buddy.” “Unaccountable power?” Musk is now in court and was just denied a compensation package from Tesla, the automaker that he founded, which some 70 percent of the company’s shareholders voted to give him, because a lunatic plaintiff found a friendly Democrat judge in Delaware willing to deny it to him. This might be the wrong week to pretend there is no accountability in Elon Musk’s life like, for example, a tenured college professor who regularly posts lies and idiocies on social media might have. Nor is Musk claiming presidential authority to fire anyone. DOGE, which he and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading up, is a privately funded informal advisory council undertaking examinations of the federal bureaucracy and its effects in creating a $2 trillion annual deficit that has run our national debt to an astonishing $36 trillion. When Musk starts naming federal bureaucrats who don’t create value for their jobs, he’s citing public information available in the public domain in order to start a public conversation about the size, scope, and efficiency of government. Elon Musk isn’t your problem, Mr. Reich. Donald Trump, who was elected by the American people for precisely the purpose of resolving the untenably large, incompetent, and tyrannical federal administrative and welfare states, is your problem. Meaning that the American public is your problem. And you should have the stones to say so. But Reich, being the small man he is (both in stature and in character), reserves his bile for the private citizen rather than the politician or the voters who chose both: After buying Twitter for $44 billion, Musk turned it into a cesspool of disinformation and conspiracy theories and manipulated its algorithm to give himself 205 million followers, to whom he is now distributing treacherous lies. Can Reich back up this allegation with evidence? I have my doubts about this. In recent days, Musk boosted posts on his website singling out the names and job titles of four federal employees working in climate policy and regulation who have done nothing other than hold titles Musk dislikes. All four targets are women. So? Nobody particularly cares about the names. The job titles are clearly indicative of functions that are outside the proper scope of government and produce little. Reich actually gives that game away by admitting the women in question “have done nothing.” And now, for a sob story, without which no leftist screed can be confected: In one instance, Musk quote-tweeted a post highlighting the role of 37-year-old Ashley Thomas, a little-known director of climate diversification at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Musk’s repost — “So many fake jobs” — garnered 32 million views, triggering a tsunami of taunts against Thomas, such as, “Sorry Ashley Thomas Gravy Train is Over” and “A tough way for Ashley Thomas to find out she’s losing her job.” Musk apparently took the word “diversification” in Thomas’ title to mean the “D” in “DEI,” which Musk considers “woke.” Thomas (who holds degrees in engineering, business, and water science from Oxford and MIT) is focused on climate diversification to protect agriculture and infrastructure from extreme weather events. Following Musk’s tweet, Thomas shut down several of her social media accounts. “Climate diversification” is not something most Americans believe we need a director of in our government. Our climate is quite well diversified, as it turns out — we have Louisiana and Florida, New Mexico and Arizona, California and Washington, Montana and Michigan, and Maryland and Maine. Hawaii and Alaska, too. Name a climate, and we’ve got it here in America without the expert ministrations of Ashley Thomas at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Which is an organization performing … what function, exactly? Oh, yes — among its charged duties is, apparently, to protect agriculture and infrastructure from extreme weather events. Should we ask the folks in western North Carolina if Ashley Thomas has paid them a visit lately? Will they vouch for the signature work she’s done in keeping their climate diversified? Ah, yes, but she has lots of degrees! This means that Ashley Thomas is an expert and card-carrying member of the managerial class, and therefore it would be unthinkable that her government job might disappear in the way that, say, an oilfield worker’s job might thanks to policy changes brought on by suggestions of “experts” elsewhere in government: In another repost, Musk mocked Alexis Pelosi, a relative of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who works as a senior adviser to climate change at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Nancy Pelosi’s niece should not be paid $181,648.00 by the U.S. Taxpayer to be the ‘Climate Advisor’ at HUD,” the original account wrote. “But maybe her advice is amazing” Musk snarked. Robert B. Reich actually thought it was a good idea to complain about Alexis Pelosi’s utterly insulting do-nothing HUD job in the aftermath of the November elections. Can you get any more out of touch than this? Musk also singled out the chief climate officer in the Department of Energy’s loan programs office and shared the name of an employee serving as senior adviser on environmental justice and climate change at the Department of Health and Human Services. I suppose that it would be somewhat significant news to many Americans that the Department of Health and Human Services employs a senior adviser on “environmental justice” and “climate change.” Why a senior adviser? Are there junior advisers as well? At this point you’re welcome to take a break and attempt to conjure up what exactly it is that a senior adviser on environmental justice and climate change at the Department of Health and Human Services would actually do all day that the taxpayers and bondholders of the United States of America would find valuable. And you’re welcome to do the same for the chief climate officer in the Department of Energy’s loan programs office. “Don’t make that loan! That guy drives an old Cadillac Escalade and keeps his house at 70 degrees in summer!” In my humble opinion, Musk’s targets should sue him for defamation. Yes, Bobby, it’s a very humble opinion. Not in the way you would describe it, though. Reich is not a lawyer. He wouldn’t make a very good one. Musk’s current targeting is even more dangerous because he has the apparent authority of the president-elect. Although the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” that Musk is co-heading (with Vivek Ramaswamy) isn’t a real department and has not been authorized by Congress, Musk is acting as if it’s real. Earlier, Reich accused Musk of claiming presidential power, and he just scuppered his own argument by admitting that DOGE “isn’t a real department.” Admitting that Musk doesn’t actually have any power beyond that of persuasion of people who do isn’t a very good way to pay off your argument about Musk’s “unaccountable power,” is it? Can you imagine taking a class for college credit from this fussy little fool? I worked in the federal government between 1974 and 1980, first at the Federal Trade Commission and then at the Justice Department, and from 1993 to 1997 I served as secretary of labor. Most of the federal employees I came to know cared deeply about the common good. The vast majority did their work carefully and thoughtfully. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. But ever since Richard Nixon attacked “unelected bureaucrats” as America’s enemy and Ronald Reagan blamed “liberal bureaucrats” for government’s failings, government employees have been scapegoated. And now Trump is preparing to attack the so-called “deep state.” And the American public voted Trump into office for the express purpose of dismantling the deep state, which for at least as long as the time since Reich helmed the Labor Department has done more harm than good while running up such a public debt tab that it’s almost impossible to fathom how it might be paid off. But somehow it’s Elon Musk who’s the problem. The guy without whom the victims of Helene wouldn’t be able to communicate with the outside world, and the guy who’s literally saving the lives of astronauts. The guy whose satellite internet service has arguably saved Ukraine from being swallowed up by Russia. That guy is a villain worthy of Reich’s ankle-biting efforts in the Tampa Bay Times and other zombie newspapers. There is more to Reich’s attack on Musk, but we’ve spent enough of our time with him. Suffice it to say that Robert B. Reich is the last man in America who should be lecturing us on either Elon Musk’s civic participation or the relative value of the administrative state. It would be excellent if he could be persuaded to keep his ravings in that benighted Berkeley classroom. But one thing we know about this little blowhard is that isn’t possible. So we’ll ignore him as best we can. But if you’re a subscriber to the Tampa Bay Times, or one of the other zombie newspapers inflicting Reich’s column on you, you might consider letting them know he’s a waste of space in their paper. Or better yet, drop that subscription and use your money to support a better class of publication. I can supply you with one idea in particular that you might find more rewarding. The post Robert Reich’s Ravings Against Musk Are Pure Lunacy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The new year will bring a new administration, and I’ll be watching to see if President-elect Donald Trump’s team finally puts an end to the worldwide taxation of individual Americans’ income. Fixing this is imperative. It would not only be sound fiscal policy but could keep millions of law-abiding Americans living overseas from being treated like financial pariahs. Trump seems to agree. “I support ending the double taxation of overseas Americans,” he promised in a campaign statement. This problem is rooted in America’s bizarre worldwide tax system. Most people don’t realize it, but if you’re a U.S. citizen, the IRS wants to know about all the dollars or euros you earn, no matter where in the world you earn them. This isn’t about jetsetters or Americans hiding money in offshore accounts. It’s a tax grab that applies even if you haven’t lived here for decades and pay your fair share in another country. It’s like having the IRS follow you around the globe, demanding an account of every paycheck, bank account, or investment. Here is how it works: If you live and work exclusively outside of the United States, you must file a U.S. tax return reporting your income, foreign bank accounts containing over $10,000, retirement accounts, investments, and other financial details. You’re responsible for paying U.S. taxes on income above certain thresholds and navigating complex forms and rules to avoid or minimize double taxation. This is not only unfair but uniquely so. The United States is the only developed nation that taxes based on citizenship rather than residency. We are in terrible company. As the Cato Institute’s Adam Michel writes, “Eritrea’s brutal dictatorship is the only other country to come close, imposing a 2 percent levy on all expatriates.” Double taxation most commonly sets in when you live in one of the many countries not covered by a tax treaty, or for foreign-earned income not protected by the Section 911 exclusion (which currently exempts up to $126,500) or other provisions that “allow foreign tax credits to offset similar taxes paid to other governments,” Michel explains. Common financial activities that are tax-advantaged in one’s country of residence (like retirement accounts or home sales) may still trigger U.S. tax liability. Americans living abroad must essentially maintain two parallel tax lives and shoulder a higher burden than either U.S.-based taxpayers or those in their country of residence. The better alternative is a territorial tax system, based on the principle that income should be taxed where it’s earned. Under such a system, if you are an American living and working in Singapore, the income you earn there is taxed only in Singapore. Territorial taxation is a fundamental concept of sound tax policy that the U.S. citizenship-based system violates. In fact, Trump’s tax reform of 2017 changed the worldwide taxation of corporations to quasi-territorial. But the worst of it lies in how remarkably difficult banking has become for many Americans overseas. Thanks to the misguided Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, foreign financial institutions often choose to deny services to U.S. citizens living abroad rather than deal with the complex reporting requirements. These individuals can thus encounter enormous difficulty in opening bank accounts, getting mortgages, and participating in local investment and retirement plans. To recap, Americans abroad must pay taxes in their country of residence, file, and potentially pay additional U.S. taxes on the same income and can’t always expect adequate financial services, all despite typically receiving very few U.S. government services. Some who face these burdens maintain minimal ties to the United States. The penalties for noncompliance are wildly disproportionate. Simple filing mistakes can result in tens of thousands of dollars in fines, even when no tax was owed. Complexity makes such mistakes easy to commit, even with professional help. While the administration has tools to limit FATCA enforcement, altogether ending it would require congressional repeal. The best way, of course, would be for Trump and Congress to work together. As for the underlying problem of worldwide taxation, the U.S. should join the rest of the developed world and adopt a residence-based tax and reporting system. This would address all the aforementioned problems and stop treating solid citizens like criminals — all while maintaining the ability to tax U.S. residents on their worldwide income and combat actual tax evasion. Such a reform would also save government resources wasted on processing complex returns from Americans abroad who ultimately owe no taxes. It would encourage global mobility for U.S. citizens, including many who are abroad promoting U.S. companies, and make American workers more competitive internationally. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: Can Musk Dismantle the Deep State? What Was the Matt Gaetz Attorney General Pick Really About? Dear Kamala, Please Stick Around The post End the IRS’s Worldwide Tax Grab appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from Dr.Bryan Ardis: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Colin Todhunter, Off Guardian: Sainsbury’s is one of the ‘big six’ supermarkets in the UK. In 2019, it released its Future of Food report. It is not merely a misguided attempt at forecasting future trends and habits; it reads more like a manifesto for corporate control and technocratic tyranny disguised as ‘progress’. This document epitomises […]

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