The Competing Ideologies for the Collectivist Mind

From Mises.org (July 25, 2022):

Competition creates service from businesses, and competition produces benefits for everyone. Neither are politics and ideologies exempt from competition, with Republicans and Democrats going door to door for their candidates, having political rallies, or even fighting in the streets. Despite this, these two parties aren’t as different as their supporters may realize. When Ukraine was invaded by Russia, they jumped on the opportunity for possible defense contracts.

Ideologies or parties that may seem completely opposite can be “bipartisan” in many aspects. Fascism, National Socialism, and Marxian socialism are three such ideologies: different enough to compete, but similar enough to attract the same type of person, that person being of the collectivist mindset that the group is more important than the individual.

Frederick Hayek in The Road to Serfdom states:

It is true of course that in Germany before 1933, and in Italy before 1922, communist and Nazis or Fascist clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties. They competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. But their practice showed how closely they were related.

The person of the collective mindset is more prone to fall into such groups, they may want the well-being of the class or the race over the individual. To ensure the success or domination of either, the state must be used as a tool of power. This is the danger of the collective mind. Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, and Karl Marx all fell into these mindsets.

Hitler: The Nazi Competitor

After the end of World War I, the German royal family was dethroned and the November Revolution saw the creation of the People’s State of Bavaria, run by Kurt Eisner, a socialist Jew. It’s worth mentioning there was a split between the communists and socialists at this time, as the communist parties wanted to be connected to the Soviet Comintern, while the socialist parties wanted to be more independent.

Either way, Hitler participated in this new Bavarian state, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia; Hitler was elected to be a soldier’s council representative to civilian authorities. After Kurt Eisner was assassinated, Hitler attended the funeral. Benjamin Hett in his book Death of Democracy states:

There is film footage and a still photograph showing him [Hitler] marching in a funeral procession of the Bavarian Independent leader Kurt Eisner, wearing a black mourning armband and another red one in support of the Socialist government.

Max Levien, who was a communist, took charge and created a Soviet republic; once again, Hitler was elected to the soviet council for battalion representatives.

A soviet is a workers’ council. The USSR was a union of workers’ councils from all the socialist republics. So, when Hitler abolished private trade unions, the DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, German Labor Front), a large state-run public union, absorbed them just as the USSR did.

In my previous article “How the Nazis Waged War on Private Property,” you will find that economically the Nazis were very similar to their Soviet counterparts (land and business confiscation along with price controls). Socially however, the Nazis were a bit different. the Marxian Socialists were more concerned with class-based conflicts, while the Nazis were more race based.

Hitler’s unreleased Second Book showed his belief in a united race:

I am a socialist. I see no class and no social estate, before me but that community of the folk made up of people who are linked by blood, united by language and subject to the same general fate.

This is where the separation of the Nazis and communists comes to fruition. Both had different immediate priorities, and Hitler considered communism a Jewish ideology; but Hitler also considered capitalism Jewish, as he considered it to be “international Jewish finance.” But one only needs to read Karl Marx’s article “On the Jewish Question” to find out Marx’s beliefs on race; he states:

As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering in its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible because his consciousness no longer has an object. The social emancipation of the Jew, is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

While both often fought and even killed one another, when you’re competing for the mind of an individual to gain power, those things often happen. Fascism is another competitor for both the national and Marxian socialists.

Mussolini and Mosley: The Fascist Competitors

Before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the communist and socialist parties were more or less united and had one clear goal: to unite the workers of the world through international revolution. But after World War I started, many of these leftist parties actually supported their countries instead of maintaining an antiwar stance, except for the Italian Socialist Party, which maintained the idea of international peace between the workers.

Benito Mussolini, who was at this time head of the socialist newspaper Avanti, saw the appealing effect nationalism had on the masses. Mussolini became a war advocate within the party and was expelled from it the same year. Mussolini, defending himself before his party, said:

I tell you you’re wasting your breath, you will be forced into the war. You can get rid of me, because I am, and will always be, a socialist. You hate me. You hate me because you still love me! What divides me from you is not a small question, it is a big question which divides all socialism.

Mussolini, along with the help of intellectuals such as Gentile Enrico Corradini and Ugo Spirito rebranded and created a new political movement. It was meant to benefit the Italian worker but was made for Italians. This new ideology was called fascism, it was syndicalism or trade unionism that was made to benefit the Italian worker but left out the international worker. In Reflection on Violence, Georges Sorel states that Fascist planning to gain control of the economy would work something like this:

Through strikes it intended to bring capitalism to an end, replacing it not by state socialism, but by a society of producers.

This is the same thing as Karl Marx calling for the workers to unite and seize the means of production, only in this case it is the national (Italian) workers uniting. Oswald Mosley, a British aristocrat and founder of the British Union of Fascists, would try to spread fascism to England. Mosley joined the Independent Labor Party, which was a politically left-leaning party, in 1926 during the general strike; he paid striking miners from his own pocket, he also visited America, where he spent time with Franklin Roosevelt. Mosley also believed in what he called “industrial democracy,” where all workers are stakeholders (co-owners of sorts) in their companies and all profits go to them.

Conclusion

The collective mind, while many consider it noble for its want to improve lives, has caused great suffering in the world. While each ideology discussed, such as national socialism, Marxian socialism, and fascism, each stem from a similar tree and promote economic regimentation, they are different enough socially to compete for someone with a collectivist mindset. But these people will always need the state and its power to wipe out the successful and usher in a utopia. [source]

It seems that birds of feather not only flock together but compete with one another. The far-Left will never acknowledge that socialism, communism, fascism, and Nazism are basically the same ideology.

Media Ignore Delhi’s Coldest May Since 1901

From CO2 Coalition.org (May 15, 2023):

On May 4, India’s capital of New Delhi recorded the third coldest May morning since 1901. At 16 degree Celsius (60 Fahrenheit), the region’s 32 million residents woke up to a relatively cold morning in what is usually the hottest month of the year.

So why is there a record low temperature when the dominant mainstream narrative tells us that climate change has made our environs warmer than before? Is this just an aberration?

While Western media obsessed with the warm weather in Spain, India’s capital recorded a very cold summer morning. In fact, most of the cold-weather records in Delhi have gone unreported in Western media, which are mainly interested in showcasing the city’s extreme summer temperatures.

Neatly concealed from the public’s eye are the record low winter temperatures that Delhi has been witnessing since 2017. In December 2018, Delhi recorded an average minimum temperature of 7°C (44°F), the third lowest in the last 50 years. On December 30, 2019, the maximum temperature settled at 9°C (49°F), making it the coldest December day in 122 years.

As is the case globally, winter cold in Delhi is a bigger killer than summer heat. According to studies, short-term exposure to extreme temperature accounts for 6.5 percent of all deaths in India, with 88 percent of that amount caused by cold weather and only 12 percent by hot weather.

This is an example of media bias towards advancing a narrative of apocalyptic warming when reporting weather events. Also, part of this slanted reporting is the media’s failure to acknowledge the real reason behind the recording of all-time high summer temperatures: the urban heat island (UHI).

Urban Heat Island, Not Climate, Sets Records

During my stint as a climate consultant in New Delhi, I lived close to the Safdarjung temperature-measurement station. As per the Indian Meteorological Department, the highest maximum temperature ever recorded at Safdarjung was 47°C (117°F) on May 29, 1944.

This high temperature recorded nearly 80 years ago for this station has yet to be toppled by the 21^st century warming that supposedly threatens us with doom, and the reason is probably the station’s location.

Unlike the other temperature monitoring stations in Delhi, the Safdarjung station is in a relatively greener section of the city. Thus, it is less susceptible to the Urban Heat Island effect, and, therefore, has not been registering the insanely high temperatures of 49°C (120°F) witnessed in and around Delhi.

Mahesh Palawat, vice-president of Skymet Weather Services, says, “Safdarjung weather station is located in a fairly green area, as compared to the rest of Delhi, which has a lot of heavily concretized spaces without much green cover. Temperatures in these parts of the city will therefore, understandably, be higher.”

So, the reason thermometers record new all-time highs in Delhi is because of urbanization’s concrete structures and pavements and other landscape changes. Weather officials also note that some of the newer automatic weather instruments used in highly urbanized areas may be prone to error.

“Most observatories in Delhi have automatic systems, which have a scope for error because they use bimetals, which can contract and expand during different weather conditions,” says an official of the India Meteorological Department in the Hindustan Times. He added that abnormal temperature spikes of the error-prone stations should be compared to the readings of older stations like Safdarjung to obtain “a more precise idea of the temperature.”

It takes just a bit of common sense to understand the artificial urban heat island impact on thermometers in cities and airports. However, preconceived notions of catastrophic warming pose serious hurdles to grasping this reality.

Delhi’s case illustrates that warming is not a continuous and unprecedented phenomenon as some claim it to be. Instead, we see at play a chaotic climate system at work with unpredictable weather patterns. Additionally, we must be mindful of the urban heat island impact when reading news bulletins about record-high summer temperatures. [source]

News the climate alarmists ignores too.

Trump signs $70B bill to fund Homeland Security Dept. through 2028

From Yahoo.com:

June 10 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump signed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement agencies through 2028 after months of battles to prevent it from happening.

"This morning I'm thrilled to sign the Secure America Act to immediately and fully fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of my term, so we won't have to be talking about it anymore," the president said in the Oval Office.

The Senate passed the $70 billion funding package on Friday, and the House approved it on Tuesday.

Democrats fought the funding for months, refusing to agree to the bill unless there were reforms to the organization after two American citizens -- Renee Good and Alex Pretti -- were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis earlier this year. But the measure was passed via reconciliation, which only requires a majority vote instead of 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

"We'll give the heroes of ICE and Border Patrol -- and that's what they are, they're heroes, what they have to go through to keep us safe -- the support and resources they need to defend our borders, protect our homeland and to keep America safe," the president added He also gave House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., credit for passing the bill with a slim majority in the House.

"Despite Democrat efforts to shut down ICE and Border Patrol, Republicans have now fully funded these agencies through President Trump's entire second term to the tune of nearly $70 billion," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in a statement. "Thanks to President Trump, our border has gone from its weakest point to its most secure point in less than two years." [source]

Good. Now, if the Senate can get its act together and pass the SAVE bill so President Trump can sign that into law.

Trump Admin Ends Biden’s Organ-Transplant-By-Race Policy

From The Federalist.com (June 3):

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) ended a Biden administration policy that required racial considerations be made to determine who was eligible to get a kidney transplant.

CMS published a final rule Monday governing the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model, a mandatory, six-year program that ostensibly sought to “increase access to kidney transplants for patients with end-stage renal disease.” However, the Biden rule, which took effect July 1, 2025, also required participating hospitals to consider race, ethnicity, and “equity” in the decision-making process for allocating organs to patients.

“CMS also wants to reiterate that allocation and transplantation decisions should be made based on objective and measurable medical criteria through the framework set up by the [Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network] OPTN … and should not be made on the basis of race or other criteria not laid out by the goals described in this section of the [Code of Federal Regulations],” the Trump CMS final rule, set to take effect July 1, 2026, states.

The rule came in response to public comment made by America First Legal (AFL) and others arguing that “transplant allocation decisions should remain grounded in objective medical criteria,” the rule states.

As AFL pointed out, the Biden rule encouraged transplant hospitals to “identify disparities among racial and demographic groups, develop Health Equity Plans, conduct resource gap analyses, establish equity-focused goals, and implement targeted interventions designed to preference selected populations.”

The Biden CMS said that “Health Equity Plans,” which were meant to determine areas where hospitals were not meeting its equity goals and then recommend remedial action, were “voluntary,” but AFL stated that they were actually embedded into the IOTA Model.

“The Biden Administration designed the IOTA Model to advance its broader equity agenda within the nation’s organ transplant system,” AFL attorney Megan Redshaw said in a press release. “Life-saving transplant decisions should be guided by medical criteria and clinical urgency — not race. We applaud CMS for removing this framework and restoring a transplant system grounded in medical need and clinical urgency.”

The Biden IOTA Model also sought to fast-track transplants and increase their raw number by paying hospitals to do more, while penalizing hospitals that are not performing to their specifications.

“Tying institutional revenue to transplant counts encourages aggressive procurement and transplant practices in a system already marred by ethical failures, oversight breakdowns, and documented patient-safety concerns,” AFL stated.

The Biden rule was an outgrowth of an executive order — “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” — that claimed the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism” and forced government programs to have non-white racial preferences for program allocation across numerous initiatives, including in business, federal contracting, housing, health care, and much more.

The Biden administration even went as far as to suggest the necessity of “racial concordance” between health care workers and patients. “Racial concordance” is the theory that health outcomes are worse when the race of the doctor is different than the race of the patient, and that therefore patients should be race-matched with a doctor. It is also an artificial way of shoehorning tacit racial quotas into the medical profession, which was the goal of the Biden administration and many medical schools. [source]

Good!  Glad that Marxist policy was ended. Should have never started to begin with.

The Robot That Beat Iran To Two American Pilots

From Daily Wire.com (June 9):

An AI-powered U.S. Navy drone boat played a key role in rescuing the crew of a downed American Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, marking what military officials say is the first real-world rescue operation involving an unmanned surface vessel.

After the helicopter went down, the two American crew members remained stranded in the waters off Oman for nearly two hours as the U.S. military rushed to reach them before Iranian forces could.

On Tuesday, President Trump revealed that Iranian forces had shot down the aircraft and vowed that the United States would respond.

“I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said on Truth Social. “There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.”

The unmanned vessel responsible for rescuing the crew is a Saronic Corsair, Capt. Tim Hawkins, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, told the Wall Street Journal.

“When it comes to search and rescue, you utilize the best asset that is the closest and the quickest, and that was the case in this instance,” Hawkins said.

The drone boat transported the soldiers to a safer location at sea, where they were later hoisted aboard a helicopter and evacuated to receive medical care. Both are in stable condition, according to Hawkins.

While such sea drones have been used in exercises, they have not been used in real-life, he added.

The vessel, which was deployed to CENTCOM in March shortly after the conflict with Iran began, is operated by the Navy’s Task Force 59, which has evolved rapidly since its creation in 2021.

The unit specializes in integrating artificial intelligence and autonomous systems into real-world maritime operations and has already tested more than 23 different unmanned platforms across the Middle East.

According to the Journal, Ukraine has used these types of vessels to target Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The incident comes just days after Iran struck Israel with at least 24 missiles for the first time since the ceasefire went into place about two months ago. In response, Israel fired back before both sides agreed to halt attacks at Trump’s request. [source]

Nice.  Cool American tech.

Islamic extremists disguised as military separated Christians from crowed, slit their throats: bishop

From Christian Post.com (Oct. 7, 2022):

Suspected Islamic extremists disguised in military uniform gathered a crowd of people in Mozambique’s Nampula province, then separated the Christians from the group and tied their hands before slitting their throats, a Catholic bishop said.

Bishop Alberto Vera Aréjula of Nacala told the Catholic group Aid to the Church in Need this week about the killings that occurred last month as was told to him by one of the Christian survivors who managed to flee.

The survivor told the bishop that the terrorists were dressed in military uniform and they gathered people saying they were there to save them.

“When they were all gathered, they started asking who is Muslim and who is Christian. Those who identified as Christian, they started tying their hands behind their back and they cut their throats,” the bishop was quoted as saying.

The bishop said the killings took place on the night of Sept. 6 and the following day, and that “11 people were murdered in total and they left a trail of destruction and a lot of fear.”

On Sept. 6, an 83-year-old Italian nun, Sister Maria de Coppi, was killed in Chipene city when gunmen stormed a Catholic mission compound and set fire to buildings, including the church and hospital, according to reports.

The attack lasted five hours as the militants ransacked and burned the Diocese of Nacala’s mission church, school, health center, dwellings, library and vehicles, Aid to the Church in Need reported earlier.

Aréjula said he knew the nun, “and she was the image of a mother, she was really helping everyone with simple love and humility.”

“Sister Maria de Coppi was a nurse who would help malnourished children in a little room where there was milk and flour, and they destroyed that room as well.

According to reports, the gunmen were likely running away from security forces from Mozambique, Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community.

At least 24 countries have sent troops to support the fight against insurgents in Mozambique, whose army has been accused of being corrupt and having 7,000 “ghost soldiers,” according to the BBC.

Islamic State-affiliated insurgents in northern Mozambique, a Christian-majority country, have internally displaced more than three-quarters of a million people, according to the United Nations.

In the coastal province of Cabo Delgado, Islamic extremists have been exploiting the crisis after a civil war started in 2017. The area is rich with gas, rubies, graphite, gold and other natural resources. Protesters demonstrated at the time against what they say is profits going to an elite in the ruling Frelimo Party, with few jobs for local residents.

“In 2017, jihadist insurgents began in the Cabo-Delgado province, winning over some locals due to the fact that they gave back resources to villagers from the government and killed no one,” the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern reported earlier. “This did not last, however, as IS started setting fire to Christian villages, and killing those who lived there.”

Cabo Delgado is a mostly Muslim region where at least 300 Christians have been killed for their faith, according to ICC. There have also been over 100 attacks on churches in the area.

In March 2021, the United States labeled Islamic State-Mozambique as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.” ISIS-Mozambique is also known as Ansar al-Sunna and known locally as al-Shabaab. The group reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as early as April 2018 and has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians.

In November 2020, Islamic State-linked militants beheaded over 50 people, including women and children, and abducted others in weekend raids in the Miudumbe and Macomia districts of the Cabo Delgado province.

Last December, Human Rights Watch revealed that insurgents had enslaved more than 600 women and girls, many of which had been abused and sold as sex slaves for as low as $600. [source]

Pure intentional evil.

Malcolm McLean: The Unsung Capitalist Hero Who Changed the World One Container at a Time

From Mises.org (Aug. 25, 2022):

Ask the average person what they believe to be the most economically important innovation of the twentieth century, and they’ll probably point to the internet. The internet has certainly disproved Paul Krugman’s prediction that it would have no greater impact on the economy than the fax machine, but even this transformative technology may only warrant a silver medal when compared to something much more banal: the intermodal shipping container.

The shipping container was the brainchild of Malcolm McLean. A twentieth-century rags-to-riches story, McLean began his foray into the transportation business with only a high school education. Working as a gas station clerk, he’d saved up $120 to purchase a used truck by age twenty-one, and in 1944, he founded his first company, McLean Trucking. In the booming postwar economy, McLean was able to expand his business in an increasingly integrated global economy.

McLean’s business primarily involved shipping freight to and from ports for overseas exchange, and he was bothered by a transportation bottleneck that had impeded foreign exchange since the ancient world: every piece of freight had to be unloaded from the truck and reloaded onto ships, dramatically increasing the overall cost of long-distance trade.

McLean had the idea to simply ship the truck itself, but this traded the freight-transfer bottleneck for an inefficient use of space. McLean’s next idea was to load only the truck’s container.

Unfortunately, the Interstate Commerce Commission stood in his way. McLean owned a trucking business, and federal regulations would not allow somebody to own both a trucking and shipping company. McClean sold his trucking company in 1955, which by then had grown to 1,770 trucks, for $25 million dollars.

With the capital he received from the sale of his company, he secured a loan for $22 million and purchased a pair of World War II tanker ships to carry his patented containers, which he designed to stack on top of each other for overseas transportation. The containers could easily be transferred to eighteen-wheelers or railroad cars. By the 1960s, McLean’s new venture was turning a profit, and shipping costs were dropping rapidly. In 1969, he sold his company for $530 million, which he reinvested in further ventures to improve containerization. By the end of the 1970s, he owned a fleet of forty-four hundred container ships.

McLean also realized that his business did not depend on the monopoly protection of his design, so he released the patent for his container to the International Organization for Standardization, royalty-free. He understood that holding jealously to his patent would only slow trucking, railroad, and shipping companies’ adoption of his technology, and he had nothing to fear from competition.

The effects of McLean’s innovation are hard to capture in mere numbers, as it helped entire economies—such as Singapore and Hong Kong—leapt from preindustrial to modern seemingly overnight (coupled, of course, with the freest markets in the world, as even the most transformative technology cannot overcome the barriers imposed by a controlling state).

McLean received his flowers in the business community, taking his place in the Forbes Business Hall of Fame in 1982. But he remains largely an obscure figure, despite being perhaps the single most important force behind the explosive growth in global wealth of the second half of the twentieth century. Thanks to McLean’s seemingly simple idea, the cost of loading a ship fell from nearly $6 per ton in 1956 to only 16 cents by 2006 (adjusted for inflation, that would be a reduction from nearly $60 to roughly a quarter)!

McLean is the unsung hero of containerization, the revolutionary economic change that, as Marc Levinson put in the subtitle of his book The Box, “made the world smaller and the world economy bigger.” [source]

American innovation at its best.