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Cato Claptrap At Its Finest

Cato, as we have pointed out many times, is controlled opposition. Cato offers the toothless, pointless, incoherent "critique" of U.S. foreign policy that the political-media-military-industrial complex is eager to accept and to tout as evidence of its willingness to "debate" the issues.

Cato of course accepts all of the assumptions underlying U.S. foreign policy: The United States is a force for good, the world is full of bad guys who need to be stopped and U.S. military alliances are all defensive in nature. Cato's only point of departure is on the issue of who is going to pay for it. The U.S. political establishment, as we know, is only too happy to foot the bill. There is no military budget that's too excessive. Along comes little Cato, yapping away that U.S. "allies" need to be doing more and coughing up more for their "defense."

Cato's line of argument is part-and-parcel of the familiar libertarian critique of welfare. The U.S., in other words, is a benevolent hegemon, and the beneficiaries of its largess have become, to use the libertarian parlance, "hooked on welfare." NATO is great; it's just that the U.S. is doing too much.

Cato's voluminous output on Ukraine is completely incoherent. But on one thing it's certain: Russia's attack was supposedly unprovoked and unjustified. It's a great shame that so many people have been taken in by Cato's fraudulent "antiwar" posturing. I guess it's good for raising money from the unsuspecting rubes who think Cato is some kind of a Ron Paul-style outfit.

It would be great if people stopped bankrolling the Cato fraud and began funding much worthier organizations. Here's something intellectually worthless from Cato (yes, I know, that's a redundancy) I just came across:

"Cato and its scholars have condemned, in the strongest possible terms, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine as well as President Putin’s two decades war against freedom and liberalism in Russia. But it’s simply wrong to conflate an argument that the policy of NATO enlargement impacted Putin’s security calculus with the idea that doing so excuses his war in Ukraine. And while Ukraine has a clear interest in deeper U.S. and NATO engagement in its defense, advocating for a sensible U.S. foreign policy that limits risk to American safety and security doesn’t place one on the side of Russia in the conflict."

https://www.cato.org/blog/ukraines-disinformation-board-terrible-idea-terrible-results

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Monday Night At The Movies: "Come And See" (1985)

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02:22:49
TG 1934: U.K. (Half-Heartedly) Threatens To Recognize Palestinian State

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's threat to recognize a Palestinian state --but only under certain conditions--and wonder what, if any, difference a British recognition would make.

01:32:40
The Gaggle Music Club: Ottorino Respighi’s "Ancient Airs and Dances"

This week's selection of The Gaggle Music Club is Ottorino Respighi’s "Ancient Airs and Dances." The composition consists of a set of three orchestral suites composed between 1917 and 1932, based on lute pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) was an Italian composer, musicologist, conductor and orchestrator. He studied composition in Bologna and later trained in orchestration under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia. The Russian master-orchestrator strongly influenced Respighi's approach to tone color. Respighi went on to become one of the most important figures in Italian music in the early 20th century. A significant part of Respighi’s output was devoted to reviving and reinterpreting early music. He created orchestral versions of lute pieces, Gregorian chant and harpsichord works. Unlike his contemporaries in Italy, he had little time for atonality and serialism.

For "Ancient Airs and Dances," Respighi, a skilled musicologist, drew on transcriptions of...

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Disclose.tv:
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Read more: https://www.disclose.tv/id/s90cg7cb5m/

@disclosetv

JUST IN - U.S. imposes sanctions on Palestinian Authority and PLO officials, including denying visas, for failing to meet commitments.

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/07/sanctioning-officials-of-the-palestinian-authority-and-members-of-the-palestine-liberation-organization

@disclosetv

NEW - Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says, "Germany is returning to support Nazism" after Germany's Foreign Minister met with Netanyahu today amid speculation that Berlin may recognize the State of Palestine.

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16 minutes ago

abso-fucking-lutely
Citat
Spiro
@Spiro_Ghost
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1 h
AI is writing the history books now...

Every time someone ask's Grok... Is this true?

This becomes more "true"

23 minutes ago
January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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