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In this mailing:
* J.B. Shurk: Why the World Economic Forum's Plutocracy Should Be Dissolved
* Raymond Ibrahim: Christians 'Face Routine Torture' in Afghanistan
* Amir Taheri: Why is Tehran Beating the War Drum?


** Why the World Economic Forum's Plutocracy Should Be Dissolved ([link removed])
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by J.B. Shurk • September 18, 2022 at 5:00 am
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* No matter how noble its stated intentions, the "Great Reset" is at its heart a program for driving political power away from individual citizens and toward the controlling interests of a small international class of financial elites.... For citizens to reclaim power, they must not only embrace the basics of free markets once again but also rekindle a fondness for questioning the motivations of political authorities.
* It is not just kings, generals, and popes who possess great power. Wherever a person, group, or institution is capable — through enticement, coercion, or brute force — of bending an individual's free will, the structures and instruments of power exist. A local school board, after all, may well have more immediate and intimate influences over a person's family than the United Nations Human Rights Council and its revolving door of despots who tend to promulgate international resolutions shielding their own crimes.
* Limited regulation keeps the costs of market transactions low. Respect for private property and fair and impartial application of commercial laws encourage capital investment. Refraining from taxing the fruits of an individual's labor fosters an exponentially more productive labor force. Providing populations with the tools to pursue and obtain knowledge and skills at minimal expense promotes not only an educated workforce but also politically competent citizens.
* The small number of multinational corporations that control most television and print news sources around the globe also control the sociological levers capable of manufacturing or shifting public opinion. Power in any form — political, economic, cultural, spiritual... must always be guarded against as a potential foe.
* "The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants...." — Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death.
* The great mass murderers of the twentieth century attest to this truth. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao killed tens of millions, but they did so, they assured the world, not for their own glory but for the benefit of "the people."
* It is no secret that money influences politics, no matter how profusely politicians may assert their civic independence from the lobbyists and benefactors filling their campaign war chests.
* Tens of thousands of laws, rules, and regulations make it nearly impossible for any entrepreneur to navigate markets without inadvertently committing infractions or becoming a future target of an ever-growing army of regulatory code enforcers. Citizens are taxed on their wages, incomes, purchases, property, investments, improvements, sales, etc., and should they still possess anything of worth upon their ultimate demise, some agent of the State is likely to take one final cut of their bequeathed estates. The same unit of labor is thus taxed repeatedly along the government's conveyor belt of confiscation.
* Notably, today's plutocrats have little interest in truly free markets.... The World Economic Forum, for instance, demands governments take urgent action to combat or address climate change, cybersecurity, online misinformation, artificial intelligence, overpopulation, the use of hydrocarbon energy, farm ownership, food supplies, the elimination of private vehicle ownership, and the imposition of citizen control protocols to defend against future pandemics. Regulation of people and markets is now of paramount importance to those with wealth and power.
* When the uber-elite successfully influence politicians to enact laws that benefit their personal financial interests -- a corrupt practice known as "regulatory capture" -- they distort the normal dynamics of any free market. When governments mandate more expensive forms of "clean" energy across the market, for instance, wealthy corporations capable of enduring these added costs reap the ancillary benefits of gobbling up the market share abandoned by smaller competitors unable to survive. This is by design.
* This fusion between monied interests and government power has created a type of reverse fascism. Instead of some charismatic political leader in the mold of a Benito Mussolini demanding that titans of industry follow his commands for the benefit of the State and in the interests of the people, a new class of plutocrats now steer the direction of national policies and pay the politicians to make sure the people will comply.
* When market competition is permitted to grow wealth in perpetuity, however, not only does a growing share of the population increase its wealth, but also political power becomes spread out more diffusely. When the "rising tide" of free markets is allowed to "lift all boats," neither the plutocrat nor communist politburo holds as much sway. For this reason, both communists and plutocrats share a similar goal — minimizing the prosperity of the majority of citizens, while maximizing the political power of a small minority of government officials. Under communism, this type of power arrangement takes the form of an oligarchy, or rule by a small few. Under the World Economic Forum's brand of oligarchy where the West's wealthiest manipulate centrally-controlled governments, the result is demonstrably plutocratic.
* When corporate behemoths adeptly forestall their own impending financial deaths through political influence and regulatory capture, however, they cheat the markets at the larger public's expense.
* For individual liberty to flourish, competing forces must always counterbalance concentrated power in any form. When economic monopoly is used to create plutocratic control over government policy, then it becomes imperative for society to unleash the full potential of market forces to destroy protracted power and wealth and encourage more widespread prosperity.
* Cheap and abundant energy sources reduce the entry costs of building a business. Minimal taxation that seeks neither to confiscate wealth nor to punish successful innovation produces an endless supply of creative talents and energies. Limited regulation keeps the costs of market transactions low. Respect for private property and fair and impartial application of commercial laws encourage capital investment. Refraining from taxing the fruits of an individual's labor fosters an exponentially more productive labor force. Providing populations with the tools to pursue and obtain knowledge and skills at minimal expense promotes not only an educated workforce but also politically competent citizens.
* Math, science, history, and philosophy have been watered-down to make room for ideological fluff often meant to divide students against each other. The combined and natural effect of all this government-sponsored malfeasance has been that intergenerational social mobility in the United States, once impressively robust, has absolutely plummeted.
* Who benefits when the most basic foundations for creating prosperity are denied to the majority of citizens? Well, those in power benefit because, by rigging the system in their favor and institutionalizing destructive habits, very few people who might challenge their dominion ever rise high enough to do so. The plutocracy wins. The insular and selfish cabal of wealthy elites who populate the World Economic Forum ultimately win. The vast majority of Western citizens, however, lose substantially... over and over again.

It is no secret that money influences politics, no matter how profusely politicians may assert their civic independence from the lobbyists and benefactors filling their campaign war chests. (Image source: iStock)

A previous essay highlighted the serious threats posed by the World Economic Forum's "Great Reset" to individual liberty, human innovation, and general prosperity. It is important to expand discussion of these threats by examining the inherent dangers to free nations when so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few.

No matter how noble its stated intentions, the "Great Reset" is at its heart a program for driving political power away from individual citizens and toward the controlling interests of a small international class of financial elites. This shift in society's balance of power has fundamentally changed the relationship between Western citizens and their national governments. For citizens to reclaim power, they must not only embrace the basics of free markets once again but also rekindle a fondness for questioning the motivations of political authorities.

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** Christians 'Face Routine Torture' in Afghanistan ([link removed])
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by Raymond Ibrahim • September 18, 2022 at 4:30 am
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* According to the World Watch List 2022, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted for their faith, Afghanistan is now the worst nation in the world in which to be Christian.
* "Beatings, torture and kidnappings are routine for Christians in Afghanistan.... Christians are martyred every year in Afghanistan, but their deaths generally occur without public knowledge. A few are also in prison... Christian converts from Islam are often killed by family members or other radicalized Muslims before any legal proceedings can begin." — The Voice of the Martyrs, 2022.
* Because Muslims tend to conflate Christians with the West in general, and America in particular — based on the popular but erroneous belief among Muslims that the West and America are still Christian — Afghan Christians were especially targeted after the U.S. invasion as a form of "collective punishment."
* Western leadership, for its part, is extremely careful not to show any concern for Christian minorities—a sentiment that goes hand in hand with Western acquiescence to Islamic sensibilities. If anything, Western leaders are more prone to turn a blind eye to, if not actively discriminate against, already persecuted Christians—as was the case with the UN and the UK, and the US during the Obama administration.
* [H]ere are the weak and vulnerable, altruistically risking their lives for what they at least believe is the good of their fellow man, while many of the world's rich and powerful, who habitually preach about "human rights" and "religious freedom" — at least when it suits their agendas, for example, by creating racial divisions in the U.S., demonizing Israel, or covering up for Islamist radicalization — have seemingly done everything possible to worsen their situation.

According to the World Watch List 2022, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted for their faith, Afghanistan is now the worst nation in the world in which to be Christian. (Image source: iStock)

The estimated 15,000-20,000 Christians who remain in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover "face routine torture and persecution from both the government and their own friends, families and communities," according to a new report.

This is not a new development. From the start on August 15, 2021, matters significantly worsened for Christians when the Biden administration abruptly surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban. The poorly-planned defeat of U.S. troops caused the Central Asian nation to fall right back into the grips of the Taliban, one of the Islamic terrorist groups complicit in the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.

During the chaos of withdrawal, there were reports that the Biden administration was actively preventing the rescue of Christian minorities from what has since become the sharia-enforcing Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

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** Why is Tehran Beating the War Drum? ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • September 18, 2022 at 4:00 am
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* By publicly announcing that an attack on Tel Aviv and Haifa is being planned, Heydari gives Israel a reason to claim "the right of self-defense" or "preventive war" if and when it decides to take military action against the Islamic Republic.
* He says that Arash-2 is capable of covering the estimated 1,100 kilometers distance between a launching pad close to the Iran-Iraq border and Tel Aviv in 90 minutes, long enough for Israel's anti-missile defense network "the Iron Dome" to destroy it over Syria or Lebanon.
* Did part of the Khomeinist establishment write the Heydari puppet-show script to derail President Joe Biden's efforts to undo Donald Trump's policy on Iran? Is the same faction not aware of the fact that there is and will not be Iranian popular support for any war based on purely ideological grounds?
* Or is the beating of war drums a ploy to divert attention from the regime's economic, diplomatic and social failures?
* Do the two generals think they can provoke a major war in the Middle East without any reaction from other nations whose security would be affected by a regional war?
* The far more important question is whether or not the Khomeinist leadership has thought through the scale and the consequences of a direct attack on Israel and assumes that there would be no retaliation.....?

By publicly announcing that an attack on Tel Aviv and Haifa is being planned, Iranian Land Forces Commander Brigadier-General Kioumars Heydari (pictured) gives Israel a reason to claim "the right of self-defense" or "preventive war" if and when it decides to take military action against the Islamic Republic. (Image source: Fars News)

In Iranian mythology, partly reflected in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, the national epic, the advice given to young men who aspire to become great warriors is to never reveal their strategy and avoid boastful talk. Rustam, Gudarz, Geeve, Bahman and other heroes of Iranian epic are never seen spilling the beans about war plans or boasting about wiping the enemy off the face of the earth.

In ancient Iranian mythology, empty boast becomes a curse ("fogor") that dooms the bravest of fighters ("yalan") to defeat.

More than four decades after the Khomeinist revolution started to steer Iran away from its national heritage and, in the words of the former Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad-Javad Zarif, "choose to live in a different way", that lesson seems to have been forgotten.

The old advice was "Two hundred talks are no better than one half action!"

The aspirant heroes of the "Islamic Revolution", however, are champions of boastful garrulity.

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