Politics The Cheneys Had One Issue the Whole Time It turns out that, for the neocons, social and economic policies were just window-dressing. Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz stand in front of the White House January 20, 2005 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images) One of the big political realignments of the Donald Trump era has been the return of many, perhaps most, leading neoconservatives to their ancestral homes in the Democratic Party. The ideological descendants of Scoop Jackson have made peace with a party that is in many respects more radical than the one they deserted under George McGovern, all because it no longer calls for America itself to come home. Liz Cheney has been on the campaign trail with Vice President Kamala Harris in the closing days of the 2024 presidential race. Neither she nor her father share the above lineage, exactly. Dick Cheney was chief of staff to Gerald Ford, was a member of the House Republican leadership team under Ronald Reagan, was secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, and fatefully the vice president to George W. Bush who really was the last voice in the room during the decision to invade Iraq. He was then the highest-ranking member of the Bush 43 administration to endorse Trump in 2016. The younger Cheney was a member of the House Republican leadership team while Trump was president. She was estimated to vote with Trump nearly 93 percent of the time they were both in office. While the official narrative is that the Cheneys defected in defense of democracy, fissures appeared over foreign policy well before the 2020 election. Liz Cheney’s track record of success in democratic elections might have continued if she had been willing to navigate the fact that almost 70 percent of her Wyoming constituents voted for Trump. First she lost her leadership position, then her House seat by 37.4 points, all at the hands of Republicans. Liz Cheney was subsequently celebrated as a profile in courage by a new partisan crowd. That was what was on display as Cheney the younger stumped for Harris with fellow Never Trumpers this week. More or less unbidden, she stuck up for Harris on abortion specifically and joined a misleading attack on the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. “And I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” Cheney said. “And so, I think this—this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines.” According to the White House transcript, Cheney volunteered to follow up on Harris’s long-winded remarks on women’s healthcare and, unlike the vice president, brought up Dobbs directly from the top.  Leaving aside for a moment the fact that some of these problems for women have arisen at least as much from misinformation about various state laws as from Dobbs itself, when the decision was originally handed down, Cheney wrote on social media, “I have always been strongly pro-life. Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court returns power to the states and the people of the states to address the issue of abortion under state law.” Republicans are currently debating what the most efficacious ways are to “address the issue of abortion” legally. But abortion policy and the last half-century of jurisprudence on the matter have little to do with January 6 or dubious election claims. Cheney here is running against Trump’s successes, not his excesses. And she is doing so in the service of a presidential candidate who would remove from the states and the people the power to regulate abortion in any meaningful way, not just clarify what is permissible under the newly enacted laws. Perhaps Harris will never get the congressional numbers, especially in the Senate, to do so. It would be nice if her new friends pushed her on the issue, however. What is evident is that even some of the more conventionally Republican single-issue hawks never cared very deeply about some of the social and economic policies they long championed and are now abandoning. And it is single-issue hawkishness at least as much as any overriding concerns about Trump being uniquely unfit for office that drives them now. Of course, that might not play in Michigan. So vague talk about allies and half-hearted endorsements of abortion will have to do. The post The Cheneys Had One Issue the Whole Time appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Why Is the Military–Industrial Complex So Bad at Making Things? God knows we give it enough money. Credit: image via Shutterstock It is beginning to look as if the immortal Trump returns to Olympus for a revival tour and the merely terrestrial Harris descends to the Elysium of yesteryear’s possibilities—the Harvard Kennedy School of Politics, the 92nd Street Y, and the rest of the Chautauqua circuit for people with master’s degrees. That’s fine, as far as it goes. The question is what to do with all that awesome power at the top of the heap. It’s time to start planning. The American Conservative’s own Curt Mills speculated last week on what the high-level staffing for Trump Redux might entail. He favors (with plenty of good reason—read the whole thing!) Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) to helm the Department of Defense and Elbridge Colby at the National Security Council. If those appointments come to pass, there will be some grousing from the dovish elements in the coalition: Cotton has been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the meatgrinder in Ukraine, and Colby’s tough-on-China stance countenances armed beef with a nuclear power over a very far away island in the Pacific. (Granted, Colby has been tempering his position publicly because of pressing practicalities—more on this anon.)  It is worth bearing in mind that the president is the commander in chief, not the secretary of defense or the national security advisor, not to mention Congress’s notional supremacy in the realm of declaring war. Cotton and Colby both share a significant virtue—a clear-eyed assessment of the U.S. military’s sorry and very expensive material conditions. It’s worth going through a parade of the more recent hits. Connoisseurs will remember the Gaza pier disaster. A contributor to that debacle was the fact that the Army’s watercraft support—tugboats and the like—is at low ebb, as detailed in a recent GAO report: “The fully mission capable rate for watercraft has steadily declined, from 75 percent in 2020 to less than 40 percent thus far in 2024.” (Fairness demands the observation that this degradation dates to the first Trump administration, when Secretary of Defense Mark Esper attempted to draw down Army watercraft support to nothing, only to reverse course mere months later.) This sorry state of affairs means the Army relies disproportionately on the Navy for logistical support. As recent events have painfully disclosed, the Navy’s logistical arm isn’t all that it should be, either—a potent brew for combined-service catastrophes. While the demand side of the equation—the national defense apparatus—deserves its share of blame, an underlying problem is the shoddiness of the supply side. We have written at length about the dysfunction of the American shipbuilding industry. The doyens of the armed forces can demand whatever they want, and sometimes do, but that doesn’t mean that the engineers and builders are going to deliver it. The ongoing saga of the Constellation-class frigate, a project that, per the GAO, is at “a standstill,” is but one instructive example.  Shipbuilding is an acute case, but the military–industrial complex isn’t covering itself with glory in other arenas, either. Most spectacularly, the F-35 project continues to be an embarrassment of headline riches. In another recent assessment, the GAO reported that, on top of the usual cost overages, the F-35 line has been missing its readiness targets for, oh, six years or so. In a bit of “do something” face-saving, the responsible Air Force general has announced his intention to get the mission-capable numbers up and declared a “War on Readiness”—not a very comforting phrase, given the American history with wars on abstract nouns. (And shouldn’t it be a war for readiness?) This is not good; in fact, it’s bad. Let’s leaven this gloomy stuff with some heartwarming news, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: Some college kids beat Boeing in a competition for anti-drone weapons prototypes. Boeing came in with a slick laser-shooting gadget, while the youths built (basically) some really big amps and knocked the vehicles for a loop with ultrasonic waves. One of these is woefully expensive and complicated; the other is not. Nor is this a unique instance. The Ukraine war has seen all kinds of rapid developments in drone warfare from cottage shops and relative newcomers like Anduril and Turkey’s Bayraktar. We wish them well. A taxpaying citizen would not be amiss, though, in asking why the outrageously subsidized military–industrial titans of America aren’t cranking out such gee-whiz solutions to battlefield problems on a daily basis. They can hire whomever they want and have practically limitless resources. What is the defense industry good for? Scoring and defending contracts is one answer. A recent profile of Anduril’s Palmer Luckey in Tablet emphasized the outsized funds the Big Five defense contractors spend on the contracting side of the business, as opposed to R&D and production. This is downstream from the legendary Clinton-era Last Supper, when the defense apparatus encouraged post–Cold War consolidation of the defense industry. This consolidation collided with the massive cash infusion from the Global War on Terror (remember what we said about wars on abstract nouns?), and the result was a frenzy of executive-branch rulemaking on the contracting process, just to keep all these disproportionately powerful market players honest. Materiel costs skyrocketed, and much of the money is going toward the lawyers and their ilk who can navigate the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS). A concrete, achievable goal for Cotton, Colby, and the rest of the Trump II gang is the reform of the federal acquisitions process. It is a tall order, and not a particularly exciting one, but it presents certain advantages. Rewriting FAR and DFARS does not depend on Congressional approval (who knows what the legislature is going to look like in January 2025), it will save a great deal of money, and—a distant third concern, of course—it will actually create the conditions for improving the material readiness of the American armed forces. Fostering competition isn’t a singular answer; the advances of the American Century were in large part produced at state-subsidized behemoths like Bell Labs, RCA, Westinghouse, Texas Instruments, IBM. R&D funding is needed; David Goldman has written eloquently in these pages about how the government might go about doing it. But acquisitions reform will free up the capital that goes to paper-pushing and, perhaps, encourage the Big Five to spend it on building things instead. Perhaps the embarrassing and, worse, hugely expensive debacles will be less frequent, or at least less expensive. The post Why Is the Military–Industrial Complex So Bad at Making Things? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Lights Go Out in Cuba  The island nation reaches its breaking point after a generation of infrastructural degradation. As the sun sank below the waves of the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, October 17, no lights flickered on in the concrete houses that line Cuban shores. More than half of the island plunged into the shadow of primitive night. Earlier that evening, Cuba’s exhausted electric grid suffered a major failure, its worst in years, leaving the majority of the country without power. Blackouts and power outages are not uncommon in Cuba; the government usually manages to patch things up somehow and get power distributed, although it is strictly rationed and often comes irregularly. That was not to be the case this time. On Friday morning, the largest electrical plant in the country ground to a halt, and the Cuban power grid collapsed entirely. Cuba had left the modern era—going the wrong direction. Without any way to use the electric hot plates ubiquitous in Cuba, families huddled around wood fires in the streets to cook their meals. Water became scarce as well, with the electric pumps that pressurize the water supply out of commission. Frozen and refrigerated food rotted in the Caribbean heat. Despite the best efforts of the workers for the Cuban Electric Union, the state power utility, who labored to repair the breakdown, the system collapsed repeatedly over the weekend, resulting in rolling blackouts in Havana and little to no power outside the capital region. The situation was made even more challenging for Cubans by the arrival of Hurricane Oscar, which made landfall on Sunday and flooded some areas of the island. President Miguel Díaz-Canel assured Cubans that the government “will have no rest” until power has been restored to the country, but at the time of writing some 30 percent of Cubans remained without electricity. In a cruel irony, the dual disaster of a national blackout and an encroaching hurricane struck the country on Cuba’s National Day of Culture, one of the holidays of Cuban independence. In a post on ?, Díaz-Canel announced that “due to the complex power and hurricane situation, we cannot celebrate the National Day of Cuban Culture in memoriam of 156 years since we set out to win our independence. But we have the Patria, the Revolution, and Socialism, which is to say, the guarantee of protection for all.” (Not, however, a guarantee of electricity.) The collapse of the Cuban power grid is a cutting metaphor for the general state of affairs that the country finds itself in. The electrical system depends on decrepit oil-burning plants sustained by significant imports of foreign fuel. The plants, built to supply electricity sufficient for the island’s power needs in the ’80s and ’90s, are now barely capable of supplying enough power to the population even when strictly rationed. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist government of Cuba lost its major patron, and the state has had to stretch its meager capacity and budget as thin as possible in order to maintain basic social functions. As a result, power generation in Cuba has grown at a crawl. The state utility scrapes as much power from the existing infrastructure as possible, but there’s no budget to do serious maintenance, to build new plants, or to renovate the electrical grid. The crisis is made worse by the lack of available fuel. Cuba has traditionally depended on importing tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day from Mexico and Venezuela, but Venezuela—embroiled in domestic turmoil and economic crisis—has little oil to spare, and Mexico has reduced its exports to Cuba to a mere 20,000 a day. Cuba does produce some oil domestically, but its homegrown product is of poor quality, and burning it degrades the already desperate conditions of the nation’s electrical plants. The state doesn’t have the money to buy additional fuel on the open market. The Cuban government has attempted a “pivot to Asia” strategy of its own, seeking to replace its former ally (and principal source of income), communist Russia, with communist China, but the Chinese government has shown little ideological interest in Cuban socialism and even less interest in providing state subsidies. Chinese companies, often so eager to pour money into emerging markets, view Cuba as a black hole that has no potential to provide returns on investment. A few days before the blackout, the Financial Times reported that “Chinese officials have been perplexed and frustrated at the Cuban leadership’s unwillingness to decisively implement a market-oriented reform program despite the glaring dysfunction of the status quo.” All told, the state has no money to properly repair the electrical system, no money to replace the damaged and outdated portions of the electrical system, and no way to entice any foreign company or government to finance such a project. Cubans wouldn’t be able to pay power rates high enough for companies to make back their initial investment, which would require billions of dollars and years of construction. The country couldn’t sell off its electrical utility for any price, even if it wanted to. The state also has no plans to do anything to remedy the situation. Committed to the ideological principles of Cuban socialism, the government is willing to literally run the country into the ground until the lights go out. The power grid will be slowly patched up over the course of this week. Rationed power will come online, and Cubans will be able to cook and access running water—for a while. But it’s an unsustainable situation. The outdated, improperly maintained power plants will not run forever. The system will collapse again, and eventually, it will collapse permanently. Some apologists will argue that the whole problem is the fault of the United States and our embargo on trade with Cuba. That is both obfuscatory and false. Increased American trade might allow Cuba to purchase parts a little more easily and have access to a few more tourist dollars with which the government could prop up the ailing economy, but it won’t change the fundamentals of the situation. Cuba has access to hundreds of other trade partners—it just doesn’t have an economy that produces anything worth trading. Cuban socialist central planning has managed to produce decent medical training and an excellent spy agency, but mostly it has produced grinding poverty and government bankruptcy. Soon, it will produce another failed Caribbean state. The lights are not coming back on in Cuba. The post The Lights Go Out in Cuba appeared first on The American Conservative.

Documentary: True Legends The Unholy See Documentary Including Giants - Learn the secrets the Roman Catholic Church and the Gov. don't want you to know. Ps. of Sol. 8:9 says, "In secret places underground their iniquities were committed to provoke Him to anger." Now you get to see some of these secret places underground. Is there evidence on earth concerning GIANTS? As the days of Noah. - We do not necessarily agree with everything in this documentary; however, it was good, and they revealed lots of secrets that are hidden from the public. Use your wisdom when watching this. - FAIR USE FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES Mirrored From: https://old.bitchute.com/channel/yahuahisone/

He's not thinking about this track. The post The Jack White song he didn’t enjoy playing live: “It’s a harsh rhythm” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Managed by Brian Epstein, produced by George Martin, and a cohort of Lennon and McCartney. The post The underrated artist Steve Van Zandt said was “right there with the rest of them” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

"It's just very beautiful." The post Lucy Dacus reveals a selection of her favourite songs: “It’s just very beautiful” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Readers have been pestering me for months as to who is going to win the election. You will remember that in 2016 I made a fool of myself when I cast my vote early for Donald Trump, the greenhorn Republican, who had never run for anything before. The day after the election, it turned out that the entire media had been wrong. Donald won. I had been right. I was of course ignored by everyone save the noble Ben Smith of BuzzFeed. Then in 2020 I upset the placid waters of the bovine media by saying Donald would win again. He lost, but not by much. And the election was controversial. In fact, it was the most controversial race of my lifetime. I held my tongue, and now the 2024 race is heading toward the finish line. Who will win? Who is the editor-in-chief pulling for? Will it be the newborn McDonald’s hamburger flipper, in his spotlessly clean McDonald’s apron, or will it be the of-a-sudden advocate for fracking, for cracking down on illegal border crossers, or some other prattle about sex changes, all subsidized by the United States Treasury? And forget not when Vice President Harris backed bugging out of Afghanistan and leaving brave American soldiers bleeding on the tarmac! I think the winner will be the candidate who picked the McDonald’s hamburger emporium as his symbol for serving the people. Donald Trump looked at a Quarter Pounder of beef and saw it as a ticket to political history. Others only saw a meal. Donald Trump will win in 2024, and he deserves to win. What is more, his appearance at McDonald’s was as brilliant as Calvin Coolidge’s appearance in the 1920s wearing an Indian headdress. In 2013, when I met Donald for the first time, I concluded that he could be a successful politician. More than that, I concluded that if he ran for president, he would win. He was not like any politician I have ever known (including five presidents). He was smart, aggressive, and he knew enough about the issues to get by. That is true of a lot of pols, but there was something more to Donald. He was a showman and a strategist. I have now, after 11 years of watching him, concluded he has still more gifts. He has the energy of a great athlete and a voice that can only be for a politician a gift from God. Donald, in 2024, you are going to win again. The post The Brilliant McDonald Trump appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

My new book on Pornhub’s reckoning, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking, teaches that to stop online sex trafficking, we must eliminate profitability. Sex trafficking, to put it simply, is the commercialization of sexual abuse. It is rape for profit. So how do we stop it? We eliminate profitability. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine, which includes this article and others like it.   In Takedown, I uncover the complicity of Pornhub’s owners and executives in the global distribution and monetization of rape and sex trafficking. Pornhub’s pursuit of profit through these means shatters countless victims’ lives, including those of children. The story begins in the early hours before dawn on February 1, 2020, as I was rocking my crying baby. I was thinking about the haunting story of a 15-year-old girl from Broward County, Florida, who had been missing for a year before being found after a Pornhub user told her mother that he had recognized her daughter on the site. In fact, fifty-eight online videos showed the girl being raped for profit. One question was unrelenting: How had these filmed sex crimes ended up on Pornhub, the world’s largest and most popular porn site, with 47 billion visits per year? This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine. After my baby went back to sleep, I pulled out my computer to test what it took to upload a video to Pornhub. I discovered that it only took an email address to post a video in minutes — anonymously. At that time, the site had over fifty million videos and images, all of which had been uploaded without verifying the age or consent of those in the content. That alarming moment was the catalyst for what became the #Traffickinghub movement, which aims to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. The virality of the movement was stunning. As the petition I started to shut down Pornhub gained millions of signatures, numerous victims of Pornhub began to reach out to me to tell their stories. Many of them also wanted to pursue justice in court. At the same time, company insiders and whistleblowers contacted me to expose Pornhub. I learned how massive amounts of illegal content were being uploaded to the site, as well as why. Here is what one seasoned company insider told me: The headlines you are sharing and the campaign you started, it struck a chord in my conscience. I don’t think there is malicious intent on the lower levels of the company, but at the executive level they are clearly complicit and it’s for the sake of revenue. It’s just money. One hundred percent. Management just sees numbers — let’s be honest. It’s like any other company but they are trading with people’s lives…. Were we planning any efforts to stop the illegal content? Absolutely not. Because of views. Every time you put an extra layer of control on what goes up, you lose content. And content is more web pages, and more web pages are more Google search results and more Google results are more paid views. Pornhub owners and executives purposefully designed the site to be unchecked — thereby enabling abuse — because they know that their financial success depends on having millions of searchable images and videos that can drive billions of visits to the site. The majority of Pornhub’s profit derives from selling 4.6 billion advertising impressions to advertisers daily.  It quickly became evident that to confront and disrupt this system, we had to attack the very means through which Pornhub’s content was being monetized. With the assistance of many people and organizations, we urged the major credit card companies to cut ties with the site. After almost three years of battling, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover finally cut off transactions on Pornhub.  We’ve also helped survivors hit Pornhub where it hurts — its bank account. Today, nearly three hundred victims are suing Pornhub and its parent company in twenty-five lawsuits across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. This includes multiple class-action lawsuits on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. The potential damages total in the billions. Since this battle to shut down Pornhub began, the company has been forced to take down 91 percent of its content due to the site being infested with unverified content and sexual crime. Pornhub has lost all its major advertisers, and both its CEO and COO have resigned. The company was sold in 2023 to a hastily concocted private equity firm called Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), which is now attempting to salvage the brand and whitewash its toxic reputation as a peddler of crime. Legitimate user-generated websites invest heavily in technology, employees, and partnerships to address and prevent illegal content. Pornhub, on the other hand, has barely started to make changes after years of being globally exposed, sued, and losing its ability to process credit card payments. It is only just now, as of September 2024, beginning to verify the age and consent of the individuals in new videos and images uploaded to the site. However, to this day, the previously uploaded unverified content remains online. Any legitimate company would delete one hundred percent of unverified content from its website immediately. The fight is not over yet, but we are closer than ever to seeing justice served. Only by ending impunity can we ensure that victims find closure and future abusers are deterred from following in Pornhub’s footsteps.  When it comes to corporate trafficking, the story of Pornhub’s reckoning teaches us that eliminating profitability is the path to justice and change. Laila Mickelwait is the co-founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund, the Founder of the Traffickinghub movement supported by millions around the world, and the national bestselling author of Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking. Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2024 print magazine. The post The Battle Tactic That Will Shut Down Pornhub appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.