[Epoch Times] Deterrence is the ancient ability to scare somebody off from hurting you, your friends, or your interests‐without a major war.
Desire peace? Then be prepared for war. Or so the Romans believed.
It's an easily understood concept in the abstract. But deterrence still remains a mystical quality in the concrete since it is only acquired with difficulty and yet easily forfeited.
The tired democracies of the 1930s learned that lesson when they kept acquiescing to Hitler's serial aggressions.
Hitler's Germany foolishly later attacked a far stronger Soviet Union in 1941, given Moscow's lost deterrence after its lackluster performances in Poland and Finland, its pact with the Nazis, and its recent purges of its own officer corps.
Deterrence is omnipresent and also applies well beyond matters of war and peace. The current crime wave of murder and violent assault in our major cities is the wage of loud efforts to defund the police and contextualize crimes as somehow society's rather than the criminal's fault.
As a result, lawbreakers now believe there is a good chance that robbing people or hurting or killing them might result in monetary gain or at least bloody satisfaction. They no longer fear a likely sentence of 30 years in prison. So, they see little risk in hurting people. And innocents suffer. Applications to the border, international relations, and other crises at the link.
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/25/2021 00:00 ||
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#1
The Great Awokening don't know nuthin' bout no deterrence. That's rayciss.
We really are two nations now. Time to separate from these grotesquely blundering self-destructive madmen persons
#2
To post modern leftists, civilization is a very icky thing. Unfortunately, many normies who self-identify as "conservatives" only think it's "nice to have" if someone else pays for it and defends it for them.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
09/25/2021 8:50 Comments ||
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#3
Someone once told me that the punishment behind a law or rule shows how seriously you take the rule. If the punishment behind rioting and mayhem is, perhaps, a couple of hours in a police station being 'processed' - they you will simply have more rioting and mayhem (see: Portland).
Guess what will happen of there is no punishment at all? In a number of places there are no punishment for minor crimes (theft, assault, etc...) - but only for certain groups of people.
[American Thinker] A prediction: When it becomes incontrovertible that forced vaccinations and lockdowns have done more harm than good, all the people in power who have caused this harm will excuse their totalitarian madness by claiming they "had the best of intentions."
Oh, we had the people's best interests at heart, really.
We were only trying to save lives.
Nobody could have predicted all this harm.
Followed, in short order, by a final self-indulgent We're the real victims here for caring too much."
It will be the latest painful example in a long line of human tragedies that arose only because the ruling elite controlling the levers of government responded to a perceived problem in the world by exploiting it for their own enrichment, re-engineering it to become more toxic and painful for ordinary people than it otherwise would have been, and then applauding their own efforts as "heroic" and "wise" examples of good governance, contrary to all evidence suggesting otherwise.
President Johnson's "war on poverty" caused more poverty, deepened the dependence upon government welfare of those most economically vulnerable, and initiated a collapse in marriage rates and two-parent families that continues to this day.
President Nixon's "war on drugs" subsidized the monopoly power of drug cartels south of the border, helped create a schizophrenic national security policy that at times aligned American strategic objectives with those of the same global drug czars designated enemies, and produced a U.S. incarceration rate that still leads the world.
President Bush's "war on terror" in response to the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor not only led to two of the longest wars in U.S. history without producing clear-cut long-term victories but also initiated a mass surveillance state that is now used against Americans by the FBI, NSA, and U.S. military to target constitutionally protected political beliefs.
President Obama's insistence that "health care is a right" that required the government to take over an entire industry (and close to one fifth of the economy) has only exacerbated the costs of medical treatment, increased the cost of insurance, wrecked the financial viability of rural hospitals, politicized the work of medical professionals, and destroyed the doctor-patient relationship by inserting the government's eyes and ears into every treatment room.
And in every one of these examples, the ruling elite who convinced ordinary Americans to go along with their plans "had the best of intentions." Sure, the powers of government agencies increased. Sure, people were left with less control over their own lives. Sure, a tremendous amount of predictable, as well as unexpected, harm fell on the very Americans those plans were ostensibly created to protect. But "nobody could have known," right? The "experts were unanimous" in their conclusions. The government was "just trying to save lives." Anybody who questions the government's "good intentions" is an "extremist."
You'll notice that each and every time the ruling class executes this strategy, a number of themes reappear:
(1) The government gives itself unprecedented powers in order to combat a terrifying emergency that must be stopped.
(2) The emergency never actually goes away, and in fact, the greater the level of institutional failure, the more necessary it becomes for the government not only to maintain its newfound powers, but also to regularly enhance those powers in its endless efforts to be successful.
(3) Anybody who attempts to warn that the government's ill conceived and impetuous actions will only lead to more varied and severe harms is immediately demonized as imbecilic, uncaring, or selfish.
Who could be against wars on poverty, abusive drug use, or terror? Who could possibly argue against health care or against doing anything required "even if it saves only one life"? It's an emergency! If intergenerational poverty and government dependence is rising, it must be because we have not yet spent enough money on the problem. If drugs and violence continue spilling over the border, there must be another law or dedicated police force or stimulus check that will fix America's cultural and spiritual malaise. If we haven't won the war on terror, it's because we will always find someone new to call a "terrorist," even if that person wears a red MAGA cap.
#2
Actually, I'm of the opinion that what's being done to the J6 internees has no good intentions at all.
Except as per Lenin, 'the purpose of terrorism is terror.'
Posted by: ed in texas ||
09/25/2021 11:31 Comments ||
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[News With Views] Over the years, and particularly after the events of September 11, 2001, and the popularization of the Internet, even the most gullible American citizen has suspected that there must be a secret reason why more often than not our government acts against the best interests of the American people, as well as helps our enemies and betrays our friends. Just a handful of scholars, however, have seriously studied the phenomenon.
The ones who have done so concluded that the U.S. Government has been hijacked by a group of rich, powerful individuals, who have been using it to advance their own private interests. This super-elite of a few hundred immensely wealthy and powerful individuals has been called different names: the Power Elite, the High Cabal, the Secret Team, the Secret Government, the Insiders, the Usurpers, the Invisible Government.
Probably the first author who rightly pointed to the Council on Foreign Relations as the true source of the invisible Government of the United States was Emanuel Josephson in his 1952 book Rockefeller "Internationalist": The Man Who Misrules the World. [1] Josephson titled Chapter XIII of his book, "The Council on Foreign Relations: "Foreign Office" of the Rockefeller Empire. The Invisible government."[2]
A few pages below he added, "So consistently have high, policy-making positions in the government been filled from the ranks of the Rockefeller’s Council that it can be called the invisible government of the United Sates."[3]
Another author who identified the CFR as the center of the invisible government of the United States was Dan Smoot in his 1962 book The Invisible Government.[4] Smoot, a former member of the FBI Headquarters staff in Washington, D.C., expressed his conviction,
"I am convinced that the Council on Foreign Relations, together with a great number of other associated tax-exempt organizations, constitutes the invisible government which set the major policies of the federal government; exercises controlling influence on government officials who implement the policies; and, through massive and skillful propaganda, influences Congress and the public to support the policies. I am convinced the objective of this invisible government is to convert America into a socialist state and make it a unit in a one-world socialist system." [5]
Later, John Stormer in his book None Dare Call it Treason,[6] Gary Allen in None Dare Call it Conspiracy,[7] and Phoebe Courtney in her The CFR, Part II,[8] further identified the CFR as the center of the invisible government of the United States. [9]
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
It's an easily understood concept in the abstract. But deterrence still remains a mystical quality in the concrete since it is only acquired with difficulty and yet easily forfeited.
[American Thinker] A prediction: When it becomes incontrovertible that forced vaccinations and lockdowns have done more harm than good, all the people in power who have caused this harm will excuse their totalitarian madness by claiming they "had the best of intentions."
