Thirteen Ways In Which The COVID-19 Threat May be Inflated

COVID-19 is a very serious problem that should be taken very seriously by both government and the public, but there are ways in which we may be getting an inflated sense of the threat:

Covidonomics: What Will the COVID-19 Crisis Do to Our Political Economy? (updated)

The COVID-19 crisis is fueling a race to find solutions for the problem while also shutting down large parts of the economy and giving governments enormous economic powers. Except for wartime mobilization, this situation is unprecedented. In this article I discuss sixteen major potential negative consequences of the crisis.

Populism for Peace

Voters generally don't care or know much about the horrors US foreign policy inflicts on so many people around the world. But to get rid off the foreign policy establishment responsible for those horrors you would need a populist revolt. So the situation seems hopeless.

In this article published on The Libertarian Institute's site I argue that there is hope after all: A populist pro-peace movement could end the Empire without even trying.

Why Did North Korea Develop Nuclear Weapons?

Scott Horton gives a very brief history of what happened (57m38s):

It was all George [W.] Bush's fault. [He] probably deliberately provoked them into doing that.

First, [the US] abnegated the Agreed Framework deal, then they announced a whole new round of sanctions, then they announced the Proliferation Security Initiative which said that we can seize all your boats on the high seas and do whatever we want with them [...] and then they announced the Nuclear Posture Review that said we just might attack you with nuclear weapons.

And only then did the North Koreans withdraw from their end of the Agreed Framework, announce they were withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty like in the deal it says you have to announce 6 months beforehand, and only then did they withdraw from the treaty, kick the IAEA out and start making nukes.

And i guess the thinking [in DC] - if you can call it thinking - was, don't worry, we'll be done in Baghdad and we’ll be ready to go to Pyongyang before they get their first nuke together, except that Oops instead we just essentially handed them an arsenal of nuclear weapons when they were perfectly happy within the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a threshold state under the Agreed Framework deal which America had never even lived up to our side of.

It just took Bush repudiating it and threatening them with an H-bomb first strike to make them withdraw from their end.

Good Protests, Bad Protests

All over the world people have been protesting their governments. Their reasons vary from economic grievances (eg high gas prices, corruption) to political concerns (eg resistance against centralization or oppression or foreign influences; political freedoms) to religious causes (eg sectarian conflict, religious freedoms).

Some protests are violent while others are peaceful or even festive. Some governments tolerate the protests while others respond with violence. Some protests are purely grassroots while others seem to be fueled by outside parties.

Given all this diversity, how do we know which of these protests are good protests from the perspective of the US foreign policy establishment? And hence, which protests will receive positive, negative or no coverage in US media?

The rule of thumb seems to be that protests are deemed good when they target (and preferably threaten) the continued existence or influence of governments that the US foreign policy establishment regards as insufficiently subservient to its interests.

And protests are bad when they target governments that are friendly to the US.

With some protests, to be sure, it may not yet be clear what the effects will be or who the main driving forces behind them are. And in some cases the protests may be relatively neutral with respect to US interests.

But in many cases it is pretty obvious whether protests threaten or support the interests of the US foreign policy establishment. These are listed below in an arguably simplistic but perhaps nonetheless useful overview:

List of Commentators Who Acknowledge They Were Wrong About Russiagate

There was no evidence of any collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. This was the conclusion of the Mueller report that was made public last April. The conclusion was subsequently confirmed by Robert Mueller himself in his testimony before Congress in late July.

Of course, if you had predicted in 2017 or even in 2018 that Mueller would find no evidence of collusion many hundreds or thousands of journalists, pundits, politicians, podcasters, TV hosts and other commentators would have thought you were a fool or worse.

Now that they've had several months to reflect it may be instructive to see which of the people who were at some point so confident that there was Trump-Russia collusion now publicly acknowledge that they jumped the gun.

A while ago I published a list of commentators and media organizations who were rationally skeptical throughout Russiagate, who always insisted that the publicly available evidence for collusion simply wasn't there. They deserve praise for getting it right.

But because intellectual honesty matters we should also praise the people who once believed in collusion but who now acknowledge that they were wrong.

You can find their names on the list below. Suggestions for additions are welcome.

Acknowledged They Were Wrong about Russiagate 

1. Michael Isikoff
2. Bobby Chesney (55:00)
3. Stewart Baker (57:15)
4. James A. Gagliano

This list will be updated with more names when needed.

Bill Browder's Sergei Magnitsky Story Is a Lie

Bill Browder tells the story of how his whistle blower lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was murdered in a Russian prison to cover up a massive fraud he had discovered. This story has been a key element in the current anti-Russia narrative that is so pervasive in Western European and North American politics.

It is also completely false.