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Nine trans women; that is, men who want to be women, according to Glamour UK.

The post And the Woman of the Year Is… appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

The theory that an exploding microphone was involved in the death of Charlie Kirk and the possibility that Israeli intelligence played a role is gaining traction. Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen tells us the manipulated equipment method has been a reality since at least 2002 and deployed in virtually every country in the world. The use of exploding walkie talkies and pagers by the IDF in Lebanon and elsewhere is common knowledge. Jon Bray, who has 8000+ followers on X (he suspects his reach is being suppressed), came up with the highly technical theory and provides details with the expertise of an engineer. He contends Kirk’s wireless mic contained an explosive with a pellet that propelled into and expelled out of his neck, making the entry wound also the exit wound. Many believe an additional simultaneous event occurred, possibly a shot from Charlie’s right side. This is the article that includes the interview with Cohen. See here.

Jon Bray has posted a video incorporating Cohen’s revelations with his own work. See here.

The post The Manipulated Equipment Method and the Charlie Kirk Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

Turning Point USA, co-founded by Charlie Kirk, started as a sort of Mises Institute for college kids according to Baron Coleman, an important independent journalist on Kirk’s assassination. Coleman says TPUSA did not begin as a religious organization or a non-profit focusing on cultural issues, but rather its founding mission was economic liberty. This makes sense since Kirk began his political activism as a teenager attending Tea Party events. As you well know, Ron Paul is a proponent of Austrian economics and is the philosophical and ideological father of the Tea Party movement. Coleman mentions the Mises Institute at 1:38 in this video. Link:

Coleman, who has a legal background, has reported that many individuals were doing Google searches on people and places connected to the Kirk assassination months prior to the tragic event on 9/10. The searches were from Israel and Washington, DC. Google Trends tracks IP addresses, and while those addresses remain confidential, the location of where those searches origin is revealed. 

The post A Mises Institute for College Kids: TPUSA’s Original Mission was Economic Liberty appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post As Trump Continues Military Build-up, Republicans Sour On Venezuela Invasion appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Bill Madden:

I think that both major political parties are two of many conduits of influence and control flowing from our super-rich controllers to the ignorant and apathetic American masses.  President Biden and most Democrats were “influenced” to flood the country with poor, uneducated people from third-world countries while the Republicans were obviously “influenced” to do nothing.

When people argue that our country was built by immigrants, they don’t seem to understand that the immigrants who built our country were 90% European ancestry.  When Lockheed opened a manufacturing plant for political reasons in Marietta, GA, they proved to the world that they could teach farmers to build aircraft.  It just took a lot of time and money.  I feel the same way about Biden’s illegals.  It might take fifty years just to get them off of the government’s welfare programs. 

We shouldn’t tolerate the treatment that is being forced on us by what are, for the most part, whores for special interests.

The post Hummm? appeared first on LewRockwell.

La traduzione in italiano dell'opera scritta da Wendy McElroy esplora Bitcoin a 360°, un compendio della sua storia fino ad adesso e la direzione che molto ptobabilmente prenderà la sua evoluzione nel futuro prossimo. Si parte dalla teoria, soprattutto quella libertaria e Austriaca, e si sonda come essa interagisce con la realtà. Niente utopie, solo la logica esposizione di una tecnologia che si sviluppa insieme alle azioni degli esseri umani. Per questo motivo vengono inserite nell'analisi diversi punti di vista: sociologico, economico, giudiziario, filosofico, politico, psicologico e altri. Una visione e trattazione di Bitcoin come non l'avete mai vista finora, per un asset che non solo promette di rinnovare l'ambito monetario ma che, soprattutto, apre alla possibilità concreta di avere, per la prima volta nella storia umana, una società profondamente e completamente modificabile dal basso verso l'alto.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/cosa-sapere-sullinseminazione-delle)

Sono trascorse tre settimane da quando un violento temporale ha scatenato catastrofiche inondazioni nella regione collinare del Texas, uccidendo 135 persone tra uomini, donne e bambini.

Tra gli sforzi di salvataggio e recupero, alcuni hanno attribuito le inondazioni alla società di inseminazione delle nuvole Rainmaker Technology Corporation e al suo amministratore delegato, Augustus Doricko, che ha ricevuto minacce di morte dopo che l'operazione di inseminazione delle nuvole della sua azienda, a 130 miglia dalla zona dell'alluvione, ha attirato l'attenzione del pubblico.

L'inseminazione delle nuvole è l'atto di far piovere da cumuli già esistenti su una determinata area; non aggiunge umidità all'atmosfera.

L'azienda di Doricko ha condotto operazioni programmate di inseminazione delle nuvole nella contea di Karnes, a Sud-est del luogo in cui si è verificata la tempesta, e sia lui che le autorità statali hanno spiegato che tali attività non hanno avuto alcun effetto sull'alluvione.

Tuttavia voci insistenti, unite al verificarsi di altre catastrofiche inondazioni nella Carolina del Nord e nel Nuovo Messico, continuano a far sì che i metodi di inseminazione delle nuvole e di modificazione del clima siano al centro dell'attenzione.

“Le inondazioni in Texas sono una tragedia [...]. Più di ogni altra cosa dovremmo preoccuparci di prenderci cura di loro [delle vittime]”, ha detto Doricko a The Epoch Times. “Ma per quanto riguarda le persone che ci ritenevano responsabili, o che avevano domande sulle nostre operazioni, ho accolto con favore l'opportunità di informare la gente”.

Cosa vuol dire inseminare le nuvole?

L'inseminazione delle nuvole non crea nuove nuvole, piuttosto consiste nel far volare un aereo, o un drone, nelle nuvole che si formano naturalmente e rilasciare al loro interno piccole quantità di ioduro d'argento e sale da cucina.

Queste particelle aggiunte estraggono il vapore acqueo dalle nuvole, dando luogo a precipitazioni forzate, sotto forma di pioggia o neve.

“Lo ioduro d'argento è un agente di inseminazione preferito perché la sua struttura cristallina è quasi identica a quella del cristallo di ghiaccio naturale”, afferma il Dipartimento delle Licenze e della Regolamentazione del Texas (TDLR) sul suo sito web. “Quando posizionato nella parte superiore della nube convettiva in espansione, ricca di goccioline surraffreddate, il cristallo di ioduro d'argento può crescere rapidamente sfruttando quel vasto campo di umidità disponibile”.

“Nel giro di pochi istanti il cristallo di ghiaccio si trasforma in una grande goccia di pioggia, abbastanza pesante da cadere attraverso la massa di nuvole come un pozzo di pioggia”, aggiunge il dipartimento.

Secondo la legge statale il TDLR è responsabile della regolamentazione nell'uso dell'inseminazione delle nuvole attraverso una procedura di licenza e autorizzazione, ed è inoltre incaricato di promuoverne lo sviluppo e la dimostrazione attraverso la ricerca.

Questa tecnologia ha debuttato circa 80 anni fa: i primi test furono condotti per aumentare il manto nevoso a New York nel 1945. Da allora è stata utilizzata in vari stati per aumentare il manto nevoso, oltre a fornire un po' di sollievo ai terreni agricoli nei periodi di siccità e a ricostituire le falde acquifere.

Nel caso di Rainmaker, il team ha effettuato un volo di 19 minuti il 2 luglio per inseminare due nuvole per conto della South Texas Weather Modification Association, al fine di aumentare i livelli delle falde acquifere. L'associazione, un'organizzazione no-profit che copre 10 contee e ha sede a Pleasanton, in Texas, è finanziata dai distretti idrici locali e dalle commissioni di contea.

Le due nubi inseminate “sono persistite per circa due ore dopo l'inseminazione prima di dissiparsi” tra le 15:00 e le 16:00, ha scritto Doricko in un post del 5 luglio su Twitter.

Did Rainmaker conduct any operations that could have impacted the floods? No.

The last seeding mission prior to the July 4th event was during the early afternoon of July 2nd, when a brief cloud seeding mission was flown over the eastern portions of south-central Texas, and two…

“Le nuvole naturali hanno in genere una durata che va dai 30 minuti a qualche ora al massimo, e persino i sistemi di tempesta più persistenti raramente mantengono la stessa struttura nuvolosa per più di 12-18 ore”, ha affermato.

Doricko ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che, in molti casi, l'inseminazione delle nuvole è l'unica opzione logica per risolvere il fabbisogno idrico nell'entroterra occidentale e nelle zone costiere, nonostante i tentativi di utilizzare l'acqua di mare attraverso la desalinizzazione.

“La stragrande maggioranza dell'acqua che attraversa la troposfera negli Stati Uniti viene semplicemente riciclata dall'oceano e non precipita su di esso”, ha affermato Doricko. “Quindi possiamo prelevare una piccola percentuale in più di quell'acqua direttamente sopra le nostre teste e cambiare radicalmente l'approvvigionamento idrico nell'Ovest americano”.

Dove e quando avviene l'inseminazione delle nuvole?

Doricko ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times che la sua azienda conduce operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole anche nello Utah, nella California meridionale, in Colorado e in Oregon.

Solo nello stato del Texas sono in corso da decenni numerosi progetti di modificazione meteorologica che interessano decine di milioni di acri, ma tutte le attività sono state sospese dopo le inondazioni.

L'inseminazione delle nuvole può essere effettuata in vari periodi dell'anno. L'azienda di Doricko gestisce un'operazione stagionale nello Utah da ottobre ad aprile, integrando il manto nevoso in previsione di un suo scioglimento precoce.

“È la stagione con le nuvole più fredde, quindi è proprio in quella finestra temporale che si verificano le maggiori opportunità di inseminazione; poi la neve che produciamo agisce come una sorta di batteria naturale di acqua che si scioglie e poi si disperde nei fiumi e nelle falde acquifere nel corso della stagione secca”.

Doricko ha sottolineato che le operazioni hanno un effetto interstatale.

“Se produciamo più neve in Colorado, non ne trarrà beneficio solo il Colorado, giusto? Ne trarranno beneficio anche lo Utah, il New Mexico e tutti gli altri stati del bacino del fiume Colorado”, ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times.

“Quindi è naturale che ci sia una collaborazione interstatale e possibilmente una collaborazione e una supervisione federale su queste cose, perché l'acqua ha un impatto su tutti nel bacino”.

“E in una certa misura lo vediamo già quando gli stati del bacino inferiore, come California, Nevada e Arizona, finanziano operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole negli stati della regione superiore perché sono beneficiari del manto nevoso presente in quelle zone”, ha aggiunto.

Tuttavia tutte le operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole richiedono quelli che lui chiama “criteri di sospensione qualificati”.

“Se c'è il rischio di inondazioni, se c'è un forte temporale, se i bacini sono troppo pieni, allora bisogna sospendere le operazioni anche quando i clienti vogliono più acqua, per non arrecare danni”, ha affermato Doricko.

Ad esempio, in Texas tutte le attività di inseminazione delle nuvole sono state sospese a causa delle forti piogge cadute nello stato fino a luglio.

Segnalazione e regolamentazione dell'inseminazione delle nuvole

Doricko ha spiegato che la maggior parte dei suoi clienti sono enti governativi di qualche livello, come i dipartimenti statali dell'agricoltura o i lavori pubblici comunali.

“L'acqua è un bene pubblico”, ha affermato.

“Ci sono aziende agricole, ecosistemi, servizi residenziali, centrali idroelettriche e industrie, tutti quanti hanno bisogno di acqua. E l'acqua che deriva dall'inseminazione delle nuvole non entra nelle tubature e non raggiunge una specifica abitazione; precipita lungo un bacino idrografico, e poi scorre nei fiumi e tutti attingono dai bacini idrici o dalle falde acquifere. È quindi naturale che molti dei nostri clienti facciano parte di enti governativi”, ha aggiunto Doricko.

La legge federale richiede che le operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole siano segnalate alla National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) con almeno 10 giorni di anticipo. Tuttavia la NOAA non ha l'autorità di regolamentare tale pratica.

Norme separate sono in vigore anche a livello statale. In Texas, ad esempio, i potenziali “inseminatori di nuvole” devono ottenere una licenza e un permesso statali per la modificazione meteorologica.

“Una persona o un'organizzazione che voglia impegnarsi nella modifica del clima deve presentare domanda al TDLR e dimostrare di possedere sufficienti competenze meteorologiche e di soddisfare i requisiti di sicurezza finanziaria e altri requisiti”, ha dichiarato lo stesso dipartimento a The Epoch Times in un'e-mail.

“La legge del Texas consente ai licenziatari di condurre operazioni contrattuali in determinate circostanze, ma non supervisioniamo il processo di assegnazione dei contratti da parte dei licenziatari, se non assicurandoci che la persona che esegue la modifica meteorologica soddisfi i requisiti necessari”.

Per quanto riguarda la trasparenza dettagliata sulle operazioni eseguite, non ci sono requisiti. Doricko ha suggerito che dovrebbe essere richiesta maggiore trasparenza a livello federale, in modo che possano essere forniti al pubblico dati più concreti sull'efficacia dell'inseminazione delle nuvole per il Paese.

Doricko spera che nel prossimo futuro vengano emanate ulteriori normative federali e, con esse, anche più ricerche.

Ricerca sull'inseminazione delle nuvole, effetti collaterali, costi

La ricerca sull'inseminazione delle nuvole e sui suoi effetti è andata avanti sin da quando questa pratica è iniziata alla fine degli anni '40.

Ad esempio, il Salt River Project (SRP) in Arizona ha dichiarato a The Epoch Times di aver recentemente completato un progetto di ricerca sulla “fattibilità dell'inseminazione delle nuvole invernali” nello stato, basato su modelli computerizzati.

“Al momento l'SRP non sta partecipando ad alcun volo di inseminazione delle nuvole e non ci sono piani per il prossimo futuro”, ha affermato un portavoce del progetto in un'e-mail.

“I nostri esperti in materia di acqua stanno attualmente analizzando i dati e al momento non abbiamo informazioni da condividere in merito alla siccità e al sostegno all'agricoltura”.

Doricko ha affermato che la quantità di ioduro d'argento utilizzata nelle operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole è minima e che utilizzarne 50 grammi causerebbe la dispersione delle precipitazioni su centinaia di chilometri quadrati.

Finora la ricerca non ha evidenziato effetti collaterali negativi derivanti dall'uso dello ioduro d'argento.

Il TDLR afferma sul suo sito web che “non sono stati osservati impatti ambientali significativi in ​​relazione alle operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole, compresi i progetti esistenti da 30-40 anni” e che la quantità di argento rilevata nei campioni di acqua piovana raccolti era pari a una concentrazione di una parte su 10 miliardi.

“Tale concentrazione è ben al di sotto di quella accettabile di 50 microgrammi per litro, come stabilito dal Servizio Sanitario Pubblico degli Stati Uniti”, afferma il TDLR sul suo sito web. “Molte aree in cui viene praticata l'inseminazione delle nuvole presentano concentrazioni di argento nel terreno molto più elevate di quelle riscontrate nelle precipitazioni provenienti dalle nuvole inseminate”.

“Inoltre la concentrazione di iodio nel sale iodato utilizzato per condire gli alimenti è di gran lunga superiore a quella riscontrata nell'acqua piovana proveniente da una nuvola inseminata”.

La Divisione delle Risorse Idriche dello Utah, che opera sotto il Dipartimento delle Risorse Naturali dello Stato, afferma che l'inseminazione delle nuvole si è rivelata economicamente vantaggiosa. La divisione ha affermato che per aumentare la precipitazione media del manto nevoso del 5-15%, servono dai $5 ai $10 per acro-piede di acqua aggiuntiva.

L'inseminazione delle nuvole “non funziona ovunque”, ha affermato la divisione. “Le condizioni devono essere giuste. Fortunatamente la topografia, il clima e i bacini idrici dello Utah rendono l'inseminazione delle nuvole invernale conveniente”.

Secondo uno studio del 2019 pubblicato dal Dipartimento di Agroalimentare ed Economia Applicata della North Dakota State University, questa pratica si è rivelata vantaggiosa anche dal punto di vista finanziario nel Dakota del Nord. Lo studio ha dimostrato che le operazioni di inseminazione delle nuvole del North Dakota Cloud Modification Project hanno aumentato le precipitazioni nei terreni agricoli, ma hanno anche portato ulteriori benefici al settore agricolo se combinate con gli sforzi per ridurre la grandine che distrugge i raccolti in quantità annuali.

L'università ha studiato nove colture dal 2008 al 2017 e ha scoperto che l'inseminazione delle nuvole ha prodotto un beneficio annuo compreso tra i $12,20 e i $21,16 per acro piantato, con un costo di circa $0,40 per acro piantato.

“Un aumento delle precipitazioni del 10% e una riduzione del 45% della grandine per acro piantato producono un ritorno economico stimato di oltre $53 per ogni dollaro speso nel programma”, ha osservato lo studio.

Riducendo l'aumento delle precipitazioni al 5%, il ritorno è stato di circa $31 per ogni dollaro speso.

Scie di condensazione e geoingegneria

L'inseminazione delle nuvole è diversa dalle scie di condensazione, chiamate anche scie chimiche, e dalla geoingegneria.

Doricko ha citato la nuova pagina web dell'Agenzia per la protezione dell'ambiente (EPA), che spiega che le scie di condensazione sono un fenomeno normale degli aerei che volano in aria fredda.

La geoingegneria, d'altra parte, è una questione diversa. Un tipo di intervento è la modifica della radiazione solare, che consiste nell'immettere particelle riflettenti nell'atmosfera per attenuare i raggi solari e raffreddare la Terra. A differenza delle scie di condensazione, è un'attività che, secondo Doricko, va presa sul serio.

“Oscurare il sole in questo modo è un'altra tecnologia che dobbiamo prendere molto sul serio”, ha detto. “Non è inseminazione delle nuvole. Avviene anch'essa nell'atmosfera, ma per il resto non è in alcun modo correlata all'inseminazione delle nuvole”.

Ha affermato che mentre i piccoli cristalli utilizzati nell'inseminazione delle nuvole vengono rigettati sulla Terra dopo che le nuvole si sono dissipate e hanno effetto solo su un'area specifica per un breve periodo di tempo, queste altre particelle restano nell'atmosfera e hanno un effetto generalizzato immediato.

“Le persone preoccupate per questo fenomeno hanno ragione a esserlo, perché si tratta di una tecnologia reale che alcune persone sono interessate a implementare”, ha affermato.

Cambiare per sempre

In diversi stati si stanno ora muovendo azioni per vietare non solo l'inseminazione delle nuvole, ma anche la modifica del clima in generale e, come minimo, per riacquistare autorità su questa pratica.

A maggio la Florida ha approvato una legge che vieta ogni forma di modificazione del clima all'interno dei suoi confini, sebbene in precedenza fosse consentita l'inseminazione delle nuvole, autorizzata dal Dipartimento per la protezione ambientale dello stato.

Il senatore dello stato, Jay Collins, ha dichiarato di aver votato a favore del disegno di legge “per garantire l'istituzione di garanzie legali contro tentativi non autorizzati e non regolamentati di alterare il clima all'interno dello Stato”.

“Ciò tutela ulteriormente la sovranità della salute pubblica e dà ai cittadini della Florida la certezza che le attività di modificazione del clima non possano procedere senza supervisione”, ha dichiarato Collins a The Epoch Times.

Tuttavia alcuni legislatori a livello federale, tra cui la deputata Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), vogliono che questa pratica venga vietata del tutto.

“Voglio aria pulita, cieli puliti, acqua piovana pulita, falde acquifere pulite e sole proprio come Dio l'ha creato”, ha scritto in un  post su Twitter il 5 luglio. “Nessuna persona, azienda, entità o governo dovrebbe mai essere autorizzato a modificare il nostro clima con qualsiasi mezzo!”.

This is not normal.

I want clean air, clean skies, clean rain water, clean ground water, and sun shine just like God created it!!

No person, company, entity, or government should ever be allowed to modify our weather by any means possible!!

Honored to add @timburchett as a…

Ciononostante Doricko è determinato a promuovere una maggiore comprensione, accettazione e utilizzo dell'inseminazione delle nuvole in tutto il Paese. Vede la raccolta delle precipitazioni nell'oceano non solo come un mezzo per eliminare la siccità e l'essiccazione dei fiumi, ma anche per rendere più verdi i deserti e aumentare la superficie coltivabile negli Stati Uniti.

“Un tempo la Central Valley della California non era altro che deserto e palude, e abbiamo progettato canali, pompe e condutture per trasportare l'acqua e rifornire quelle fattorie, e ora è una delle regioni agricole più produttive al mondo”, ha affermato.

“Direi che sul letto di morte ciò che [vorrei] ricordare di aver fatto per i miei figli è l'estensione delle Grandi Pianure dal Texas attraverso il Texas occidentale, il Nuovo Messico, l'Arizona e la California: tutta quella terra è rigogliosa e verde”.

[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una mancia in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

Lew,

November 2nd was Patrick Buchanan’s 87th birthday. Pat is a hero because he spoke truth to power, politically challenged the corrupt US Uniparty system when he ran for president three times, defended the sovereignty of America, and warned us about the collapse of Western Civilization in his book “Suicide of a Superpower.” In honor of this great man, I am sharing this devastatingly prescient interview he gave in 2012. Pat discusses his antiwar views, US interests vs. Israel’s interests, the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, the cultural war in America, and the decline of Christianity. “We ain’t never gonna get back unity, cohesion and the sense of one nation and one people under God.”

The post Happy Birthday to the Great Pat Buchanan appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lew,

Del Bigtree, Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) founder, host of The Highwire and documentary filmmaker, explained to Alex Jones how HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is making significant positive changes. While RFK Jr. fights off sabotage attempts by who knows how many of his 50,000 employees, he is taking on Big Pharma which has a stranglehold over the government and mainstream media. The removal of chemical dyes from food and lead and arsenic from baby food, and warning of the causal link between Tylenol and autism are a few of his accomplishments. Del says pharmakeia is a death cult, noting its symbol of two snakes replicating the double helix of human DNA. All the crazy ingredients in childhood vaccines – mercury, aluminum, eternal cancer and aborted baby DNA cells, are akin to a witch’s brew. See here.

Bigtree’s new documentary “An Inconvenient Study” is about the attempt to cover up a study by Henry Ford clinic Health concludes vaccinated children are six times more likely to suffer from autoimmune diseases than unvaccinated children. The secret study has since been published. See here.

The post RFK Jr.’s Success Taking on Big Pharma and An Inconvenient Study Documentary appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you judged the modern financial order by its behavior rather than its press releases, you’d think it had no conscience at all. When entire nations are crushed under debt, when pensioners are wiped out by “innovations,” and when bubbles enrich the few while immiserating the many, the institutions responsible respond with a shrug and a bonus cycle. We can’t say that bankers are monsters; yet the system itself has evolved—or been designed—to reward those who can act as though they had no empathy.

A System That Selects for Detachment

Clinical psychopathy is rare—perhaps one person in a hundred—but the behaviors that mimic it are everywhere on Wall Street and in the ministries of finance. Decades of psychological research show that corporate hierarchies amplify traits such as dominance, charm, and moral detachment. In a 2010 study by Babiak, Neumann, and Hare, roughly four percent of executives scored in the psychopathic range—four times the base rate. Similar experiments by Paul Piff at UC Berkeley found that the wealthier and more competitive the participant, the more likely they were to cheat for advantage. The lesson is simple: design a game that rewards cold calculation, and you will eventually fill it with cold calculators.

The Birth of the Moral Vacuum

Modern money creation finished the job. When money ceased to represent savings or substance and became a ledger entry created as debt, it also ceased to carry moral weight. A banker who issues a loan today doesn’t transfer stored value; he types new digits into existence. Interest then turns those digits into a claim on someone else’s future labor. The greater the leverage, the greater the bonus—until the defaults cascade and governments rush in to socialize the losses.

Mises and Rothbard warned that credit expansion unbacked by real savings plants the seeds of its own collapse. In their Austrian view, sound money rooted in market discipline is the only safeguard against the cartelization of banking and politics. But the modern order did the opposite: it merged the two (state politics and private banking) into a single machine. The result is an economy that behaves as though empathy were a design flaw.

As I explored in my book The Debt Machine: How Private Banks Engineered Global Control, this transformation wasn’t accidental; it was the logical outcome of allowing private credit creation to replace honest money. Once money became debt, conscience became optional.

Purchase here

Case Study: The 2008 Financial Crisis

Take the mortgage bubble. Banks created trillions in loans to borrowers who could never repay them, sliced those loans into derivatives, sold them to pension funds, and then insured the packages with more derivatives. When the system imploded, the same institutions were rescued with public money while millions lost homes and savings. Not one major executive went to prison.
A genuinely psychopathic person shows three traits: lack of remorse, refusal to accept responsibility, and the ability to rationalize harm. The 2008 rescue ticked all three boxes—but at the institutional, not individual, level.

Central Banking: The Cartel With a Flag

As Rothbard observed, the Federal Reserve functions as a “governmentally sponsored cartel” — a partnership of state and banking interests that privatizes profit while socializing losses. By controlling the price of money—interest rates—the Fed rewards leveraged speculation and punishes prudence. Every cycle ends the same way: excessive credit, asset inflation, collapse, bailout, repeat. Yet each new bailout is sold as “stability.” When European banks were drowning in 2011, the European Central Bank created over a trillion euros in new liquidity to buy time.

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

When the “COVID emergency” arrived, central banks simultaneously printed trillions and called it salvation. The same “experts” who assured us that money printing was harmless assured us that lockdowns would save the economy, that experimental mandates were acts of public virtue, and that dissent was a threat to safety.

The institutions that engineered the largest wealth transfer in history called it a public-health response. What began as a “crisis” became a test of obedience—and those who passed it were rewarded, not for wisdom, but for compliance.

Over $9 trillion was conjured in the United States alone, inflating assets for the rich while eroding the real wages of everyone else. The establishment called it stimulus; in truth, it was lucrative triage for a system already in cardiac arrest. The moral feedback loop is gone — those who cause the damage never feel the pain, and so the pathology only deepens. If 2008 revealed moral detachment, 2020 revealed something much deeper.

Psychopathy by Design

A true market punishes mistakes. A cartelized financial system eliminates punishment through political capture. Once losses are socialized and profits are private, recklessness isn’t a flaw—it’s a strategy. From the point of view of the participants, empathy, restraint, or moral hesitation are competitive disadvantages. The incentive is to externalize harm and internalize gain—precisely what a psychopath does when left unchecked.

Debt-based money ensures that this pattern is permanent. Because all money is issued as interest-bearing credit, new debt must constantly be created to service the old. If credit creation slows, defaults rise and the political class panics. Hence the endless call for “growth,” however hollow, and the refusal to confront the costs it imposes on both nature and society. A system that must expand or die will behave like a shark—efficient, unreflective, and indifferent to collateral damage.

Examples Hiding in Plain Sight

• Student-loan portfolios securitized and sold to investors while graduates drown in obligations that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy.
• Corporate buybacks funded by cheap debt, enriching executives even as companies slash long-term investment.
• Sovereign bailouts in the developing world that transfer public assets to foreign creditors under the banner of “stability.”

Each example follows the same pattern: abstract profit at the top, human cost below, and a press release assuring us it was necessary.

What Real Reform Would Look Like

Real reform begins by restoring moral feedback to money creation. That means ending the privilege of private credit creation and re-anchoring currency issuance in public accountability. The 1930s Chicago Plan, drafted by leading economists at the University of Chicago, proposed full-reserve banking—stripping private banks of their power to create money and returning that sovereign function to the people. Its logic was simple: end the privilege, end the cycle of boom and bailout. Whether through full-reserve banking, sovereign digital credit, or competing private currencies is less important than the principle: those who create money must also bear the risk of loss.

Transparency is the second pillar. No more secret facilities, no more alphabet-soup bailouts. The plumbing of money should be public knowledge, not priestly code. And finally, ethics must return to economics—not as moral posturing, but as the recognition that a society that turns every value into a price will, in time, discard every value that cannot be sold.

The Moral of the Machine

The late psychologist Hervey Cleckley defined the psychopath as a person who “knows the words but not the music.” Our financial order knows the language of prosperity but not its meaning. It can model markets to six decimal places yet cannot tell the truth about who benefits and who pays. The spreadsheets are perfect; the souls are missing.

As I examine in the book The Debt Machine, this isn’t about hating bankers or glorifying poverty—it’s about recognizing that the very architecture of money has been built to reward the traits of a machine: speed, aggression, and detachment. Unless we redesign that architecture to reward stewardship instead, we will keep mistaking the cunning of greed for intelligence or wisdom.

This is what it means to return from illusion to reality — to build an economy that serves life rather than consumes it.

Sound money, honest credit, and transparent risk are not nostalgic slogans; they are the minimum conditions for sanity in an economy. Until we recover them, we will remain ruled not by men of reason, but by a system that acts—coldly, efficiently, and predictably—like a psychopath.

The post The Psychopathic Machine: How Modern Finance Learned To Live Without Conscience appeared first on LewRockwell.

Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, Vladimir Putin wanted to join NATO. It was early in his Presidency in 2000 when he expressed interest in Russia becoming part of NATO.

In a March 2000 BBC Interview, when asked if Russia could join NATO, Putin then-Acting President, said:

“Why not? I don’t rule out such a possibility”.

Later the same year, Putin apparently raised the idea with then-President Bill Clinton, saying something to the extent, “Let’s consider an option that Russia might join NATO.” And Clinton replied, ”Why not”.

To make this accession talk even more serious, Putin raised the point with then-NATO Secretary General George Robertson. According to Robertson, Putin even insisted that Russia should be invited to join NATO as he felt Russia was too important for having to stand in line with other countries, waiting for a possible accession.

Eventually Putin was told that this was not the way it worked, that a country wanting to join needed to file a formal application.

As we all know, Russia did not join NATO. As some say, Putin felt “snubbed” having to apply as other “minor countries”. He wanted to be treated as an “equal” partner, whatever that meant. Maybe, he felt Russia should be treated as “more equal” than others.

Well, that did not work out. But not just for this minor reason. The Kremin and of course President Putin himself started realizing that NATO was expanding ever more eastwards, despite the promises made in 1990 by the Allies, when German Unification was discussed:

“NATO will move not one inch east of Berlin”, said then-US Secretary of State James Baker. He said it in February 1990 to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Though not in writing, such a political verbal commitment has legal standing.

Early in the first decade of the current millennium, President Putin began seeing NATO’s continued eastward expansion – despite the 1990 promise – as an increasing threat to Russia’s security. The Russian Security forces, from which Putin then and now, receives a lot of support, viewed already then membership in a western alliance as a betrayal of Russia.

The 2002 US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT) further exacerbated Russian distrust of the west. The last bits of trust went down the drain with the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, clearly initiated and fueled by the west.

Later the western (US)-sponsored Coup d’État in February 2014 in Ukraine – the beginning of the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia, accompanied by the ever-closer movement of NATO troops to the reaches of Moscow. Now (unofficially) in Kiev. And the rest is ongoing history.

Nevertheless, the question may be asked, what if Russia joined NATO in or around the year 2000?

President Putin is a clever statesman. Did he just test the waters when he asked President Bill Clinton and had apparently serious talks with NATO’s Secretary General about joining?

Or was he serious, because he foresaw what eventually happened, the breaking of the 1990 James Baker promise, and the steady eastward movement and encirclement of Russia by NATO, and hoped, as a member, as he said, a strong, “more equal” member, he could have stopped this move?

And, if it would have come down for NATO to decide on a Russian application, would the NATO Generals have accepted it? Would Russia eventually have accepted NATO membership, in a movement that became ever-more aggressive against Russia?

It is doubtful because with the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO officially ceased to be a necessary defense force for Europe against possible (imaginary) aggressions from the Soviet Union / Russia.

NATO was never designed to be a “defense force”, but one of aggression – aggression primarily against the Soviet Union / Russia. The same as the two World Wars – their purpose was to conquer the Soviet Union / Russia, her riches, her immense territory. Still today, this is the key purpose of NATO, eventually taking over and conquering Russia, come hell or high water, or both. And in the process, destroying Europe, beginning with the neo-fascist armed to the teeth Germany and France following closely in Germany’s footsteps.

It will not happen. But this never-ending attempt may again destroy Europe, as a potential “hot” WWIII – conventional or nuclear – would most likely be fought again on European soil.

So, let us dwell a bit more on the “What if…” question.

Assuming, in a weak moment of NATO management, the top generals would have said yes to Russian accession. Where would the world stand today? Dominated by a super, unimaginable military force under one roof? A One-World Dictatorship exacerbating current Globalism to the brink… of world collapse?

Or else, would Russia have been the NATO member to convert NATO into a peace-seeking force, basically replacing the useless UN Blue Helmets and more?

Or would Russia have divided NATO into East and West – an equilibrium without an interest in fighting each other but rather in cooperating? Converting NATO into a non-armed “League of Nations”, seeking peace, not war?

Today, we have NATO and the West against the Global South, Russia, China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS-plus and the entire Global South. The west which is 15% of world population against the Global South’s 85% of world population, economically about of equal strength right now, both with more than 40% of the world’s GDP.

But financially? Who is running the world’s finances, banks, central banks, Bank for International Settlement (BIS), the Cities of London, Zurich, the Vatican?

Would a NATO-Russia alliance have dismantled NATO and the financial behemoths pulling the strings behind the organizations and institutions we see and fear? And we would have lived in a safer world? Or would we be on the way to a safer world?

Financial equality, based on sovereign national economic output, is a key element to convert the world into a chessboard of more equals, less poverty, more fair opportunities? More space for peace-based growth?

Today, a non-NATO Russia with China and the Global South – can they do it?

Point and counter-point.

Weight and Counter-weight.

What if….?

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post ‘What If’ Russia Joined NATO? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Steele Creek Presbyterian Church.

Somehow the news that the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, would soon pass the one million mark in population did not surprise me. For the past half century the city, the largest in the Tar Heel State, has longingly looked to Atlanta as something of a model, actually hoping one day to surpass it in importance and influence commercially and financially…and to leave behind forever any semblance of its history and memories as a characteristically “Southern” city.

What this has meant is that huge areas of the surrounding county, Mecklenburg, have been literally swallowed up by the encroaching metropolis. Most all traces of its rich rural history and the hardy citizens who once populated it—many whose families settled there before the Revolutionary War—seem to have disappeared, except for an occasional historical highway marker or a random mention in some business promo.

That news put me in mind of my many boyhood days in the 1950s spent with my father’s relatives in what was then a largely still-rural, still-agricultural countryside, where reminders of an earlier history yet dotted the landscape, and where folks lived on the same plots of land that their grandparents and great-grandparents had farmed.

And I also recalled the old church that had been the center around which my father’s people had gathered. For although I am a traditional Latin Mass Catholic, my Dad’s folks were hardy Scots Presbyterians who first landed in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s and then ventured south to Piedmont North Carolina. They brought with them their Protestant faith and established early on houses of worship, which became centers of their communities.

One of those was Steele Creek Presbyterian Church. Steele Creek, the second oldest church in Mecklenburg County, was founded in 1760—265 years ago.Early in the summer of 2018 Steele Creek Church closed its doors for good. The church had decided to merge with another Presbyterian Church in the area, Pleasant Hill. The Gothic revival-style brick structure was abandoned, purchased by nearby expanding Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

As late as the early 1970s Steele Creek counted 1,000 members, but the encroaching airport and the constant deafening roar of supersonic jets every moment of the day speeding off to Munich, London, Latin America and all points in between, plus the precipitous decline in the Presbyterian Church USA, which has gone the way of all mainstream Protestant denominations and embraced the liberal woke social gospel, had brought the membership down to around 350, many of them adults who held on to the memory of a Presbyterianism that once boasted of a Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney…but now could only grasp for scraps from a barren Progressivist table.

Next to the historic 1889 building is the Steele Creek Cemetery, one of the more historic burial grounds in Piedmont North Carolina, holding over 1,700 graves, the earliest from 1763, twelve years before the onset of the Revolutionary War [See: The History of Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, 1745-1978; Third Edition, Charlotte, 1978].

Steele Creek Presbyterian Church cemetery.

In that cemetery are laid veterans of every conflict and war that the American nation has engaged in: those who served during the Revolution when the then-tiny hamlet of Charlotte served as an unwelcoming “hornet’s nest” for General Lord Cornwallis; a few who went off later to fight in Mexico or against Britain again in the early Nineteenth Century; many more who joined Confederate ranks to defend the independence and rights of North Carolina in 1861-1865; then, others who fought in the great world wars and conflicts since then. But there are others, also: husbands and wives, and children, of those who had formed up until recently a close-knit, church-oriented farming community like many spread over the Tar Heel State and the South.

Since 1777 over sixty members of my father’s family have been buried in Steele Creek’s sacred ground. Six of them are direct ancestors, including my grandfather and grandmother Cathey, my War Between the States great-grandfather, Henry Cathey [13th North Carolina Regiment], and my eight-greats grandmother, Jean, who was born in County Monaghan, Ulster, in 1692, a descendant of Scots who migrated there from Ayrshire in the early 1600s.

As a young boy I recall vividly attending the funeral of my grandfather, Charlton Graham Cathey (1958), in the old sanctuary and the impressive minister John McAlpine who comforted my grandmother who would pass on four years later in 1962, aged almost 98.

Those events remain engraved in my memory, even to the point of recalling the Protestant hymns sung—“How Firm a Foundation” and “Blessed Assurance,” two of granddad’s favorites.

But most of all, I remember that remarkable church, its strong and impressive brick structure, that aura associated with and radiated by it, which deeply connected it to the history of old Mecklenburg County, to North Carolina, and to the land and families who settled nearby, and for which it was the center of their lives for generations.

The cemetery remains in church hands, despite the shrinking congregation having departed. It is too historic, so despite some earlier efforts by the airport authority to have the graves moved, it will remain where it is for the foreseeable future. But the old 1889 structure, its brick walls and interior now silent, is deserted, owned by the airport, serving only as a disappearing memory for those who care to recall what it once meant to so many. Although the city originally designated the remaining church structure a protected historical landmark, just recently the city altered that status and expropriated twenty-three nearby acres for industrial development.

In 1904 essayist and polyglot Henry Adams, scion of the fastly extinguishing Adams family of Massachusetts, authored a marvelous little volume, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In it he contrasted the accomplishments of the modern age, its spirit and objectives, with those of the high Middle Ages, in particular the great works of sublime architecture created during that period. While for modernity its symbol was the dynamo, the unthinking, whirring and cold mechanical devices increasingly dominating the landscape, for the Middle Ages its endearing symbol was the Blessed Virgin, Holy Mary, whose sublime tenderness and inexhaustible love for the Faithful inspired such miraculous structures as Chartres Cathedral. Adams expresses this with a certain irony, contrasting our modern fascination with and hypnotization by machines (and now with an inhuman, impersonal technology) with the Blessed Virgin as Heavenly Queen whose centrality, reality and endless bounty are manifested exuberantly in such cathedrals. Noting the devotion to Her as our champion before the Throne of God he writes: “True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the Virgin embarrassed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason, behind all the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored her with a passion such as no other deity has ever known …” And why she sparked such incredible creativity which mirrored that devotion and faith.

Steele Creek Church still stands as the supersonic machines speed off overhead from Douglas airport to Europe, Latin America, or maybe Cancun. In a way, like Chartres compared to the modern dynamo, there is no greater contrast than what has happened to the million-person city of Charlotte, and the remembrance of a heritage and inheritance that Steele Creek incarnated and reminds us of. Modern Charlotte and its airport make stark comparisons with the haunted walls and ancient graveyard of Steele Creek. For in the bustle of the metropolis and the incessant noise of the jets there is little memory of who we were as a people, little connection to our rich historic culture.

In the late 1950s “the Queen City” that I remember as a boy was where older families yet predominated, where my father’s people were neighbors to the families of Billy Graham and Randolph Scott, where folks could recall the area’s history. Charlotte and Mecklenburg County were still linked strongly to their traditions. Now Charlotte rivals Atlanta as a mega-metropolis, and a soul-less anthill of business, banking and international commerce, with little room for heritage, except as a veneer to attract an occasional tourist not going to a Carolina Panthers game or to some big event at the coliseum.

I forget who said it—perhaps Faulkner, maybe Louis Rubin, I cannot remember—but that if he had known what Atlanta would become today, then he would wish that Sherman had torched it more thoroughly. Given what Charlotte has become, perhaps the same sentiment might be uttered?

The last major portions of farmland out near the Catawba River that had belonged to my dad’s family since 1750 are now sold to developers and strip malls. The pre-Revolutionary War house that my father was born in back in 1908 (the last of his family to do so) is now, thankfully, preserved at the Historic Latta Plantation. But the whole region has changed radically, altered and almost unrecognizable and discordant to my memories of sixty-five years ago. Hundreds of thousands of transplants (many from up North) now make Charlotte and its suburbs home and live—if you can call it that—the frenzied life of our tawdry, commercialized age.

I am put in mind of the great Southern Regionalist writer, Donald Davidson, in his epic poem, “The Tall Men”:

This is Rupert of the House
Of Rupert, famed in history,
Pondering on his income tax,
Deducting genealogy.
Great-grandfather from a loophole
Potted Choctaws in the thicket;
Rupert, menaced by the Reds,
Scratches the Democratic ticket.
[….]
Rupert, mounting in his car
Zooms up to God in Rotary.
Grandma Rupert had ten children;
Rupert’s father begot five.
All of Rupert’s stocks and bonds
Are strained to keep one son alive.
Democracy, a fuddled wench,
Is bought from tousled bed to bed.
Bass voices in white vests defile
The echoes of great voices dead.

There are remnants of the old culture that survive, a few, but they are fast being overtaken by a triumphant “Yankee” culture which Robert Lewis Dabney warned about 150 years ago, the fear that we would, as he said, become like our conquerors of 1865. Dabney, the Old Light Presbyterian divine that he was, declared that his role was like that of Cassandra at Troy, to prophesy and speak truth, but not to be believed until too late.

My mentor Russell Kirk once told me while we were discussing the old South and the changes being inflicted on her from both without and within that “it is hard to love the gasoline station where the honeysuckle used to grow.”

Steele Creek Church and its cemetery remind us who we are and who we have been. Despite being passed by and deserted, those gravestones cry out to those who would listen and take heed.

Perhaps, then, for those who do, our watchword could be from Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno in his volume, The Tragic Sense of Life: “Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”

Is this not, then, our challenge, to keep both memory and hope alive?

The post Chartres Cathedral, the Cemetery, and the City of Charlotte appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Ukrainian army has lost control over the Pokrovsk / Myrnograd agglomeration. Russian forces had over months slowly enveloped the cities from the east and the west. The corridor leading out of it was put under Russian drone control. Any vehicle trying to pass through was attacked.

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The Ukrainian leadership had thrown any reserves it had to reopen the corridor to the city. All such attempts were destined to fail. A last Hail Mary move was the helicopter insertion of a dozen special forces commanded by the Military Intelligence Service GRU.

Ukraine lands special forces in embattled Pokrovsk, sources say – Reuters, Oct 3 2025

Ukraine landed special forces to fight in embattled parts of the eastern city of Pokrovsk earlier this week, just as Russia said it had surrounded Kyiv’s forces in the area, two Ukrainian military sources said on Friday.
…
The Ukrainian special forces landed in a Black Hawk helicopter a few days ago in the operation, which was complicated by Russian drone activity, a source in the 7th Rapid Response Corps said.

The operation was overseen by military spy chief Kyrylo Budanov, and the troops headed to areas of the city claimed by Russia and seen by Moscow as vital for Ukrainian supply lines, the other source said.

At least 10 servicemen could be seen dismounting from a helicopter in a field in a video seen by Reuters. The news agency could not independently confirm the location or date when the video was filmed.

A video of the helicopter insertion is here

Other videos, according to AMK mapping, show that none of the inserted soldiers survived:

Based on the geolocations I did of the Russian FPV drone strikes on Ukrainian special forces, and additional analysis of the footage, we can now deduce where the soldiers ran after being dropped off by the helicopter behind Russian lines.

A group of 11 soldiers were dropped off at the specified point (48.29667, 37.13317) and split off into two groups.

Five soldiers ran towards the forest next to the O0525 Highway and then towards the gas station on the edge of the industrial zone. Three were hit by a drone strike after being caught in the forest along the way, and the two survivors attempted to make a run for the gas station but were hit by another drone when crossing the fields.

Six soldiers ran south from the landing spot and split up as they approached the industrial zone. Four ran southwest into the forest towards the substation, but three were hit by a drone. The fourth soldier escaped back to the edge of the forest before also being hit by a drone while hiding under a tree. As for the other two soldiers from this group, they were able to enter the first building of the industrial zone and hid in a room on the ground floor. Three drones then flew in through the windows, with two striking them.

So, knowing all this info, it seems that all 11 soldiers were killed or wounded in these attacks. Evacuations of any survivors are unlikely due to their presence behind Russian lines, and they will likely be captured by Russian troops.

The fact that the insertion was leaked to Reuters points to an attempt to accuse General Budanov of a reckless waste of men.
As Strana reports (machine translation):

Ukrainian “Suspilnoye” also writes, citing sources, that the assault groups of the Main Intelligence Directorate entered areas of the city that “are of strategic importance for Ukrainian logistics” and where the Russians had previously entered.

The operation involves “several helicopters”, and Budanov is near Pokrovsk to direct the actions of the GUR, the newspaper writes.

Ukraine has not officially confirmed this.

Why, if not to denigrate Budanov, would anyone leak this to the press?

Another soldier, Stanislav Bunyatov, is outraged by the release of a video of the landing of special forces.

“The problem is that one degenerate sent a video to another degenerate, and the third degenerate leaked the fact of landing, the landing site to the Internet and created a demand for the destruction of special forces and hunting for these helicopters. Do you think that after this, it will be possible to evacuate the fighters from the battlefield with a”bird”? I hope that the published video will not be ignored, and the perpetrators will be brought to serious responsibility,” he wrote.

Russian military publics showed their video of the alleged flight of two GUR helicopters to Pokrovsk. They also specify that the landing party landed in an industrial zone in the north-western part of the city, through which the Pokrovsk garrison is supplied.

At the same time, the “DPR” reports that part of the landed special forces was destroyed (Russian media quoted Igor Kimakovsky, an adviser to Pushilin).

Budanov is known for planing and executing terror attacks in Russia.

He is also known for reckless operations which have killed many of his men. Last year the special forces of the GRU made three boat assault attempts to capture the Russian controlled Zaparozhia Nuclear Power Plant. Some 50 Ukrainian soldiers got killed when all three attempts failed.

The Ukrainian (former) President Vladimir Zelenski and his political operator Andrei Yermak see Budanov as a potential competitor in future elections. It would not be astonishing to learn that the leak of the failed helicopter insertion was initiated by them.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Ukraine – Hail Mary Operation To Unblock Pokrovsk Has Failed appeared first on LewRockwell.

ASEAN is quite a delicate geopolitical entity: gracious, polite and consensual but at the same time, always privileging its “centrality”. The collective 11 Southeast Asians (East Timor is the new member) are very serious global players – with a GDP of $3.8 trillion, and constantly rising.

On a personal level, when I decided to move from the West to Asia, in 1994, I chose Southeast Asia: then, it was imperative to follow the Asian “tigers” – or flock of geese – with the Big Goose, China, flying right behind them.

Kishore Mahbubani, the former Singapore ambassador to the UN and dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, has been the paramount analyst of ASEAN over the years, including in his must-read The ASEAN Miracle. There was never a miracle: it was a matter of hard work and combined geopolitical/geoeconomic savvy.

As chair of ASEAN in 2025, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim – one of the most capable diplomats on the planet – had a very tough job; to conduct a smooth, well balanced and productive summit in Kuala Lumpur projecting that notorious ASEAN unity while significantly advancing trade and cooperation within ASEAN and with external partners.

He did pull it off – riding the Trump tariff blitzkrieg with flying colors.

Predictably Western mainstream media had only one provincial, obsessive focus: Trump in Asia. The media circus could not be more predictable – but Anwar let it flow. Trump presided over the – shaky – deal between Thailand and Cambodia, officially known as the Kuala Lumpur Peace Accords; that calls for the demilitarisation of the extremely tense Thai-Cambodia border, expanding on a ceasefire reached in July – and brokered by Malaysia, not the US.

The decades-long border problem between these two ASEAN neighbors is virtually intractable: it focuses over different interpretations of colonial-era maps, and how and where to settle everything. Thailand does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). That’s Cambodia’s preference. Thailand wants a bilateral deal through a Joint Boundary Commission.

Cunning Ways to “Diversity” From China

Trump came and went, but the meat of the matter remains what’s cookin’ between ASEAN and China – the group’s number one trade partner: bilateral trade last year reached $771 billion.

Both China and ASEAN are key players in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the top trading bloc on the planet, covering 30% of global GDP. Anwar hosted an RCEP summit the day before they signed an upgrade to their wide-ranging free trade agremment, with emphasis on digital and green economy.

It’s no wonder that for Beijing, ASEAN is a matter of supreme importance. The Trump tariff blitzkrieg was essentially directed at both.

Cut to the 28th ASEAN + 3 summit, part of the Kuala Lumpur proceedings. Chinese Premier Li Qiang was adamant on the need to strengthen the alignment of their development strategies, as cooperation between ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea continues to deepen – in industrial and supply chains. Beijing once again stressed the need to “safeguard the multilateral trading system.”

Russia was also a key presence in Kuala Lumpur, as part of the East Asia summit. Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk emphasized Moscow’s growing partnership with ASEAN in nuclear technology, logistics and of course trade. It’s not by accident that in every forum in Russia, President Putin stresses that the fastest growing regions in the world right now are Africa and Southeast Asia. Hence ASEAN’s centrality in the Russian “pivot to Asia”.

In the Kuala Lumpur corridors, in bilateral and multilateral discussions, of course the main theme had to be the Trump tariff tantrum and its deeply disturbing effects on supply chains. But, as a Thai entrepreneur observed, it was also clear that small and medium-sized companies across ASEAN are starting to regroup.

The garment sector all across ASEAN was severely punished. Trump tariff blitzkrieg imposed 19% on nearly all of Malaysia’s exports to the US. That’s among the lowest rates in ASEAN – roughly the same with Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia. Yet with Laos and Myanmar it was much worse: 40%. Add to it an American obsession with trans-shipment – as in the rerouting of made in China products via ASEAN, also to be mercilessly tariffed.

So one of the solutions for loads of manufacturers is to “diversify” from China. That’s a tricky proposition – very well explained in this analysis when it comes to booming Vietnam, which expects to grow by a whopping 10% next year.

Essentially, lots of Chinese and foreign companies significantly relocated to Vietnam even before the tariff tsunami. That’s predictable: Vietnam has a young, ultra-motivated, very well educated, hard-working workforce, and it’s close to China in connectivity corridors, culture, customs and also institutionally.

The numbers tell a fascinating story. China exports over $150 billion a year to Vietnam and imports $97 billion. That means that China’s capacity to absorb Made in Vietnam goods is now at over 82% of the US market, and imports from Vietnam keep growing. Vietnam won’t do anything to alienate China.

Moreover, China already has a nearly $60 billion trade surplus with Vietnam – and counting, while its labor costs remain lower than in the US, the EU and Japan. China’s exports to Vietnam are most of all high-quality, low-cost goods, many processed in Vietnam before being exported to the US and the EU.

So China’s supply chain is the absolute key factor when it comes to Vietnam’s trade surplus with both the US and the EU. The bottom line: for Hanoi, the Chinese market is way more essential than the US market.

All Aboard the Yuanization High-Speed Train

And that brings us to the fundamental theme discreetly but enthusiastically discussed in Kuala Lumpur – and beyond: the renewed drive for the Yuanization of Planet Earth.

Everyone – ASEAN +3, RCEP – is fully aware that the People’s Bank of China announced the full connection of its yuan digital cross-border settlement system to the ASEAN 11 plus 6 nations in West Asia, discreetly byapassing the US dollar.

Talk about strategic patience. In fact CIPS, the Chinese Cross-Border Interbank Payments System, may soon offer payment settlements to most of the Global South.

CIPS has already processed ¥52 trillion (roughly $7 trillion) in settlements overall, overtaking clumsy SWIFT in several ultra-strategic connectivity corridors. For example, 95% of Russia-China trade – and counting – is now settled in their own currencies.

Of course there are problems. The digital yuan may not be an all-around solution – yet – because there’s no liquidity. It is rarely available outside Hong Kong.

Yet a lot of players trying to escape the threats and tariff tantrum tsunamis will start to pay serious attention. Digital yuan settlements take a matter of only 7 to 8 seconds. Moreover, they allow for transaction tracking and automated enforcement of anti-money laundering laws. Compare it to archaic SWIFT – where delays of up to 5 days are practically the norm.

Last year, the volume of yuan settlements across six ASEAN nations, including Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, reached 5.8 trillion yuan – 120% more than in 2021.

The digital yuan was key in New Silk Roads/Belt and Road Inititave (BRI) projects across ASEAN such as the China-Laos high-speed railway and the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway – combined with the Beidou navigation system and quantum communication technologies. That’s the Chinese Digital Silk Road in effect – with the digital yuan arguably working as the top strategic BRI tool.

So, in a nutshell, China is already creating a loop of yuan payments across Southeast Asia; and at the same time is officially rewiring its massive financial system to trade globally bypassing the US dollar. No wonder the Empire of Chaos has gone berserk.

This article was originally published on Sputnik News.

The post How ASEAN Keeps Its Centrality Between China & US appeared first on LewRockwell.

Six weeks ago, President Trump was scheduled to give remarks on the potential causes of autism. Shortly beforehand, the press became aware that Trump would focus on the link between Tylenol and autism, resulting in the national media collectively ridiculing that link immediately before the press conference.

In that press conference, Trump stated he had felt very strongly about bringing attention to vaccines and autism for 20 years, that he felt we were giving too many shots too quickly, and that they needed to be spaced out. There was no reason to give the hepatitis B vaccine prior to children being 12 (which, as I showed here, is true), and Tylenol increases the risk of autism, so if possible, it should be avoided during pregnancy, and you should not give it to infants.

Secretary Kennedy added that some 40 to 70% of mothers who have children with autism believe a vaccine injured their child, and that President Trump believes we should be listening to these mothers instead of gaslighting them—something many of us never expected we would hear in our lifetimes from the Federal government.

Note: regrettably, to show they believed in “Science”, pregnant mothers began quickly posting videos of themselves taking large amounts of Tylenol (which I compiled on  here—including a tragic overdose).

Over-the-Counter Pain Management

Because of how uncomfortable pain is, pain treatments have long been a core market in medicine. Remarkably however, most standard pain therapies have serious issues and often lead patients to needing more and more severe interventions.

Typically, the first-line treatment for pain is an over-the-counter medication, such as acetaminophen (Tylenol), ibuprofen (Advil or Motrin), naproxen (Aleve), aspirin, or topical diclofenac (Voltaren gel). Unfortunately, these medications all have dose-dependent toxicity and typically only elicit partial improvement in pain.

Many consider NSAIDs (ibuprofen and naproxen) amongst the most hazardous drugs in the U.S. because:

• They are the leading cause of drug-related hospital admissions—often due to heart attacks, strokes, bleeding, and kidney failure (e.g., at least 107,000 Americans are admitted to hospitals each year for NSAID GI bleeds).

• Kidney damage is a significant risk. One study found a 20% increased risk of kidney disease from NSAIDs; others found up to 212%. Amongst kidney failure patients, 65.7% were found to be chronic NSAID users.

• NSAIDs raise cardiovascular risks. NSAIDS also increase the risk of heart attacks and death (e.g., extensive studies have found between a 24-326% increase1,2,3). Two of the worst ones, Vioxx (Merck) and Celebrex (Pfizer), were designed to reduce stomach bleeding but instead caused heart attacks and strokes. Merck hid data on Vioxx’s risks; eventually it was withdrawn after an estimated 120,000 deaths. Celebrex, still on the market, has been linked to 75,000 deaths. Merck’shandling of Vioxx later informed how pharma pushed the HPV vaccine and mRNA vaccines.

• Gastrointestinal bleeding is common and often fatal. In 1999, over 16,000 Americans died from it. NSAIDs also cause small bowel damage in over 50% of chronic users—often undetected—leading to “small bowel enteropathy” and possibly chronic illness through gut permeability.

• They impair healing, especially of ligaments, creating long-term re-injury risk.

Note: the dangers of NSAIDs are discussed further here.

The poor efficacy of OTC pain medications, along with their significant toxicity, was one of the primary reasons I spent the last year trying to bring attention to DMSO, which is dramatically more effective than any other over the counter option (e.g., I compiled extensive literature demonstrating that here, and have received well over a thousand reports from readers saying it produced miraculous improvements in pain)—and more more importantly does not have the major safety issues seen with most over the counter pain killers.

Note: I am currently working on an article about DMSO’s uses for genitourinary conditions (e.g., menstrual or prostate issues, infertility, erectile dysfunction, UTIs or cystitis). If you have had any DMSO experiences with them you can share (e.g., by replying to this), that would greatly help the readership here.

Tylenol Toxicity

Tylenol (acetaminophen or paracetamol) is generally considered safer than NSAIDs, though it too is often ineffective for severe pain. When metabolized, it produces the metabolite NAPQI (N-acetyl-p-benzoquinone imine), which is highly toxic to liver cells because it irreversibly binds to essential cellular proteins.

Typically, relatively little NAPQI is produced and is quickly neutralized by liver glutathione. However, when too much Tylenol is taken, the other detoxification pathways get saturated, glutathione stores get used up, and rapid liver death from unneutralized NAPQI ensues.

As a result, Tylenol overuse leads to 56,000 ER visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths annually in America.

Additionally, Tylenol has several other major issues:

• NAPQI is also toxic to the kidneys, and in 1-2% of overdose cases, the kidneys are also damaged.

• Numerous studies have linked gastrointestinal side effects to the use of Tylenol.

• In one review, Tylenol was found to increase the risk of: bleeding or perforated peptic ulcers (+6–121%), heart failure (+9–98%), myocardial infarction (+0–73%), hypertension (+7–62%), and chronic renal failure (+19–129%).

• A systematic review identified data suggesting chronic Tylenol use increased blood pressure, increased asthma (a possible 15% increase), and caused a 3.6-3.7 increase in gastric bleeding.

• Tylenol has been associated with an increased risk of blood cancers: +16% from low use and +84% from high use.

• In children of mothers chronically using Tylenol, a review found the following increases: hyperkinetic disorder (+37%), ADHD medication use (+29%), autism spectrum disorder with hyperkinetic symptoms (+51%), and asthma in offspring from frequent use in late pregnancy (+110%).

• A recent systematic review of 46 studies conducted on the risk of Tylenol during pregnancy causing neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) in offspring found that the majority of studies detected an increased risk, those of higher quality were more likely to detect the association, and the increase was dose-dependent. The increased NDDs included autism, ADHD, and other NDDs affecting learning, social/motor skills, attention, cognition, emotions, and behavior.

Note: this study is arguably the most definitive proof that Tylenol is not safe during pregnancy and was the one Trump and RFK’s team highlighted at their recent vaccine announcement.

All of this led to a rather peculiar media phenomenon:

Note: numerous internal documents and public statements have shown that by 2017, Tylenol’s manufacturer was well aware of the drug’s link to autism.

Treating Fevers

A standard hospital procedure is for nurses to check patients’ vital signs every few hours, and if anything is abnormal, contact the supervising doctor. One of my continual challenges was telling nurses I did not want to treat fevers—something which doctors had diametrically opposed views on, with the majority wanting to treat fevers. I was quite astonished to see the head of the FDA speak out against this practice:

Why Do We Treat Fevers?

There are a few justifications for treating fevers:

1. Fevers significantly increase metabolic demand on the body, placing additional stress on vital organs. In ICU settings where organ functions are compromised, reducing metabolic demand may prolong survival—though it’s acknowledged that fevers aid in eliminating infections. There is no clear consensus within critical care on how fevers should be managed.
Note: Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation, a potent therapy for infectious diseases that also treats a variety of other conditions and often appears to “re-energize” the body, as a myriad of poorly functioning systems resume their normal function during a UVBI session. I mention this as one of the primary “side effects” of UVBI is that when it eliminates an infection it will often create a fever.

2. High fevers can cause brain damage. Hyperpyrexia is defined as a medical emergency, with thresholds ranging from 105.8°F to 106.7°F. According to Penn State, brain damage generally won’t occur unless the fever exceeds 107.6°F.

3. In children, fevers can sometimes lead to seizures. However, a 2017 Cochrane review found that fever-reducing medications provide no benefit for preventing febrile seizures, and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against this practice.

4. To reduce the discomfort of the fever (the primary reason most Tylenol is prescribed).

Arguments Against Treating Fevers:

1. Fevers provide valuable diagnostic information about new or recurring infections.
Note: in infants, unexplained fevers over 100° often warrant a (justified) immediate evaluation for sepsis—which is one of many reasons why the (fever-causing) newborn hepatitis B vaccine is so problematic.

2. Relapsing fevers characterize certain autoimmune and infectious diseases, so, if a fever is artificially suppressed, the diagnostic signal is lost.

3. The body relies upon fevers to eliminate illness, and in some trials, suppressing fevers extends the duration of illness.

4. As Tylenol has systemic toxicity and reduces liver function and glutathione (necessary to detoxify toxins), this can potentially worsen certain illnesses or increase the likelihood a vaccine will cause autism.

5. Suppressing febrile illnesses transforms them into more severe infections.

Of these, the fifth is the least appreciated and hence will be expanded upon.

The 1918 Influenza

In December 2019, I became aware of COVID-19 and became very worried that it would cause serious problems. We spent January and February studying a variety of resources, including literature from the 1918 pandemic that provided critical insights for treating COVID-19 (and saved the lives of those in our close circle).

Note: I consider the 1918 influenza pandemic one of the most deadly and devastating pandemics in history. Over 2.5% of those infected died (with much higher rates ranging from 12%-90% in Native American populations). Since most of the treatments tried failed, the few that worked were quite noteworthy to me.

Throughout that literature, many clinicians treating the infection stated that using aspirin on patients’ fevers significantly increased their risk of dying and that those who had previously been treated with aspirin tended to have the poorest response to the therapies, which otherwise worked for the illness.

Note: at that time, doctors routinely used large aspirin doses which are known to be toxic.

Since that time, fevers have been recognized as critically important in fighting infections. Some of the key pathways include:

• Fevers boost the activity of immune cells like neutrophils, monocytes, and T-cells
• Fevers promote type I interferon responses that inhibit viral replication
• Fevers trigger heat shock proteins to activate immune defenses
• Fevers work synergistically with stressors like iron deprivation to amplify damage to pathogens
• Fevers slow pathogen growth early, helping to control infections

During COVID, I had multiple conversations with people where I advised them against suppressing fevers with Tylenol or ibuprofen. Still, they did anyway, then decompensated and had to go to the ER. I found that heating someone who was acutely ill (particularly with infrared mats) often made them feel significantly better immediately, and no longer want fever medication. From this, I formed the hypothesis that the discomfort associated with fevers results not from the heat itself, but rather from the strain the body undergoes in trying to heat itself.

Read the Whole Article

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I am more confident that Putin’s reasonableness, his politeness, his nonresponse to provocations have greatly widened the conflict with Ukraine, which in reality is a conflict with the West, and are leading directly to a much wider and more serious conflict. My confidence in my position has increased because I have just read an article by Alexander Dugin who in my opinion is Russia’s best thinker.  Indeed, he should be the President of Russia or at least the Foreign Minister.

Putin chose nonaggressive response to Western provocations in order not to confirm the propaganda that he was out to rebuild the Soviet Empire and in order to build trust so that the matter of Russia’s insecurity with NATO on Russia’s border could be addressed.  Unfortunately, as I and Alexander Dugin realize, Putin’s approach to communication does not work with Trump and the West. Putin’s soft approach to communication is read by Trump and the West as weakness.  When Putin and Lavrov say, “We are open to dialogue,” the West thinks Russia lacks the strength to continue the war.  Consequently Washington and Europe treat Russia as a subordinate rather than as a great military power.  As Dugin says, Trump and Europe perceive Putin’s politeness as weakness, Putin’s reasonableness as cowardice, Putin’s willingness to negotiate as capitulation.  Dugin, like myself, is convinced that Washington and Europe must be disabused of this erroneous perception that Putin’s reasonableness is weakness instead of an attempt to build confidence so the real issue–the threat to Russia’s security–can be addressed.

Putin’s well-meaning attempt has failed.  As Dugin says,  “Trump, convinced that it’s enough to press, threaten, or raise his voice for the conflict in Ukraine to end,” demands a cease fire that he can wave as another “peace victory.” Trump is in a hurry, which makes it impossible to find common ground in real negotiations in place of Trump’s dictate to Russia of the terms of settlement.

Dugin concludes that it is past time to disabuse the West and the White House of their notion of Russian weakness with a slap in the face, a demonstration of force that will bring Washington, Europe and the UK to the realization that their policy toward Russia is bringing them annihilation. 

Putin’s mistake was believing that there is good will in Washington and Europe  that his patience could arouse and result in a mutual security agreement  before the unrelenting pressures on Russia resulted in another of the West’s unnecessary wars, perhaps this time the final one.

Putin’s pacific approach has resulted in the West disregarding Putin’s warnings with skepticism and disbelief.  Dugin concludes, “Rational arguments are exhausted. The West must be made to fear.”  The West, Dugin says, believes in force, so Russia must show them the dangers of Russia’s strength.

My view for years has been that the longer Putin waits before he puts down the Russian foot, the more powerful the Russian response must be.  If Putin waits much longer, he will have to launch his nuclear super weapons.

The problem that Putin faces was brought to him by the West.  It is his response that is in question.  It is apparent to me, to Alexander Dugin, to Gilbert Doctorow that Putin has stuck with an incorrect response for too long, and Putin’s incorrect response is leading to nuclear war that will destroy the Western World and possibly the planet Earth.

Here is Dugin’s article.  Experience an intelligence that can be found nowhere in the Western media or foreign policy circles. I am also encouraged that Dugin agrees with me that there should be a Russian-Chinese mutual security agreement–I would include Iran–as such an agreement would disabuse Washington that its wars can be sequenced.

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Prince Andrew shall no longer be called Prince Andrew. He is now just Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. Buckingham Palace made the announcement this week.

The Royals released a statement saying that Andrew will lose his “prince” title and be forced to leave his Royal Lodge home in Windsor. The statement suggests they believe the allegations that he committed sexual assault are true. From the announcement:

These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him. Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

Revealed in Memoir

The move comes just days after the release of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice. Giuffre accused Andrew of sexually assaulting her when she was 17 after being trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein. She died in April of this year; her family said she committed suicide after the “toll of abuse … became unbearable.” Giuffre said she was involved in three sexual encounters with Prince Andrew. One of those times was during an orgy with Epstein and eight other minors.

Andrew had always denied Giuffre’s allegations. But he also paid out a reportedly handsome settlement in 2022. The amount was not disclosed, but reports say it came out to about £12 million ($16.3 million).

Giuffre’s family members were glad to hear the news about Andrew. Her brother, Sky Roberts, and his wife, Amanda Roberts, issued a statement to People magazine, saying, “Today, an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage.”

DOJ Stalling

The decision by the Royals to banish Andrew will likely revive scrutiny stateside against the Justice Department (DOJ) for what many believe is a blatant refusal to be fully transparent. The FBI released a statement in June announcing that it was essentially closing the Epstein case. It concluded that Epstein did indeed kill himself, that no list of clients who paid for sex with minors exists, and that there is no “credible evidence” that he blackmailed powerful people. The memo triggered a torrent of backlash, especially from President Donald Trump’s base. Ever since, the Republican-controlled Congress has tried to tamp down the outrage by releasing thousands of documents through the House Oversight Committee. Odd thing to do after the DOJ announced there was nothing more to see.

The flame of public ire burned hot for a few months after the DOJ’s memo, but has died down over the last month. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely to stay that way. The special election of radical Democrat Adelita Grijalva in September has secured Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) the votes he needs to force a discharge petition on a vote to release all DOJ files on Epstein. Massie has criticized the Oversight Committee’s release as a sneaky way for the Trump DOJ to curate what comes out and what doesn’t. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of the discharge petition once the government shutdown ends.

Jes Staley

Massie, during a House committee hearing on oversight of the FBI in September, dropped the name of another alleged Epstein client and indicated he knew the identities of 19 more. He named Jes Staley, a former banking executive who worked with Epstein when he was a client of JPMorgan. The Virgin Islands has sued JPMorgan, Staley’s former employer and Epstein’s former bank, and accused Staley himself of funneling Epstein’s money. The lawsuit revealed emails that suggested “that Staley may have been involved in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation,” according to reports about the suit. Court documents said Epstein shared photos of young women with Staley. The two had also a discussion that appeared to use Disney characters as code.

Staley has never been charged with sexual crimes. However, he was nevertheless “forced out at Barclays in 2021 as the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK-equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission, launched an investigation into allegations that Staley misled the agency and the Barclays board about his dealings with Epstein,” according to reports.

Massie Still Fighting

In early September, Massie and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) held a press conference with eight other alleged Epstein victims. That’s when one of them, Lisa Phillips, said they were going to release their own list. “We know the names,” she said. “Many of us were abused by them. Now, together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know, who are regularly in the Epstein world. It will be done by survivors, and for survivors.” Afterward, Massie said he would work with the victims to release the names, lest they all be sued into oblivion.

The Royals’ decision to banish Andrew only piles onto the already high stack of evidence suggesting there is much more to Epstein’s operation. It bolsters the raging suspicions that Epstein provided minors for sex to very powerful people. He almost certainly did not traffic only to himself, and almost certainly did traffic to other high-profile figures. It is a stunning display of audacity by the DOJ to continue to pretend it has no credible evidence suggesting otherwise.

This article was originally published on The New American.

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Last week, Peter joined David Lin to discuss recent action in markets and politics. He starts by explaining why the global rush into gold is not a speculative fad but a structural shift in the monetary system. He then lays out the market evidence, the historical context, and the fiscal realities that, in his view, make gold a logical hedge against currency debasement and a warning light for what comes next.

He begins by comparing gold’s latest run to the history books, noting that central banks are not buying gold as a speculative bet, but to re-establish gold as monetary backing for their currencies:

They’re buying gold to restore gold as the monetary backing of their currency. And this, I think, is a major transformation in the global monetary system. I think it’s on the order of, or maybe bigger than what happened in the 1970s when we went off the gold standard. And so the world went from having the US dollar backed by gold as the reserve to just having a fiat currency as the reserve. That was a significant shift in the monetary order.

Peter points to a stark historical metric: measured in real money (gold), US equities have collapsed over decades, and even collecting coins outperformed stocks once dividends and real returns are considered:

Given the fact that just holding gold in a shoebox beat the Dow, and I’m not talking about just the price, it actually beat the return because the dividend yield has been pretty low over these years. You actually did better just holding a gold coin. And so I guess, given that, I think Wall Street finally recognizes that yes, gold has a place in your portfolio. And if that’s the case, well, this rally has a long way to go because that means a lot of investors have a lot of gold they need to buy.

He connects that shift to the unsustainable fiscal path of the United States, arguing the federal government cannot honestly repay its liabilities without dramatic currency debasement:

But I think what’s even more significant is a long overdue realization that the US cannot possibly repay its debt, honestly, that the national debt, which is now 38 trillion, and of course that’s just the bonded debt, not with all the unfunded liabilities, but the treasuries that a lot of foreign central banks own, there’s no way the US government can repay that debt in money that isn’t dramatically debased, meaning that the US government will not be able to raise sufficient tax revenue to make good on its obligations. The Fed is gonna have to print the money.  

Peter is skeptical of government-directed investment and the political incentives that drive where taxpayer money is sent, noting that public officials lack the downside that private investors face:

But when the government is allocating capital, it’s not doing it for those reasons because it’s not allocating your own money. I mean, when Donald Trump decides to put taxpayer money into an investment, it doesn’t cost him anything if it goes sour, right? Remember with Solyndra, right? If you’re investing somebody else’s money and you have no skin in the game, what the hell do you care? So now you start to be guided by politics, right? Which companies is the president investing in? What is he getting under the table to allocate taxpayer money to these investments?

He closes by tying the fiscal and monetary paths together: the only realistic stopper for widespread banking distress, he argues, is massive money printing — and that outcome points to a dollar and sovereign debt crisis, the very signal gold is already sending:

But that is the environment that we’re in. And it’s going to get a lot worse. And I think the only way that we’re not going to see widespread failure in the banking system is if we have massive money printing. And so that’s going to ultimately cause a dollar and sovereign debt crisis. And again, that is what gold is telling you. Gold is the monetary canary in the coal mine.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

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The New York Times has just published an excellent editorial on the dangerous direction in which America is headed under President Trump. It is entitled “Are We Losing Our Democracy?” The editorial lists 12 factors pointing toward America’s slide into authoritarianism. I highly recommend reading it.

Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment are now accelerating America’s slide into authoritarianism with their violent and deadly regime-change operations in Venezuela. Using the federal government’s decades-old drug-war racket, Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA are illegally killing innocent people on the high seas, engaging in CIA interventionism inside Venezuela (including, no doubt, state-sponsored assassinations), and now threatening to launch direct military bombing attacks on Venezuela itself. As Randolph Bourne pointed out, “War is the health of the state.”

Meanwhile, after flipping back and forth on the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump seems to have finally settled on the side of Ukraine. No doubt the Pentagon played a major role in influencing Trump in this direction, given that it’s the Pentagon, operating through its Cold War dinosaur NATO, that is the entity that is actually waging war against Russia by using Ukraine as its proxy.

Why do I bring up Ukraine in the context of addressing what is going on with Venezuela? Because it’s ironic that ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials and their supporters in the mainstream press have condemned Russia for its “unprovoked” war of aggression against Ukraine, ignoring completely the role that NATO (i.e., the Pentagon) played into intentionally provoking Russia’s invasion.

Why is that ironic? Because those same U.S. officials and many of their mainstream-press acolytes are now non-plussed by the U.S. aggression against Venezuela! It’s as if the U.S. government’s aggression is no big deal while supposed Russian aggression reflects an attempt to conquer the world. (To its credit, in its editorial the New York Times condemns Trump’s and the Pentagon’s extra-judicial killings in the Caribbean as “defiance of U.S. and international law.”)

Trump’s and the Pentagon’s illegal killings in the Caribbean and the CIA’s paramilitary interventionism in Venezuela are bad enough. But make no mistake about it: If Trump launches direct military attacks on Venezuela itself, this will be one more illegal U.S. war of aggression against a country that has not attacked the United States. That’s important because that’s the type of war that was condemned as a war crime at Nuremberg. Moreover, it will be a war that is illegal under our form of constitutional government, given that the U.S. Constitution requires a congressional declaration of war before the president can wage war against another nation state.

What about the much-vaunted U.S. war on drugs? Doesn’t the U.S. government wield the legal authority to enforce its drug war against other nations?

Absolutely not! Every nation on earth has the authority to adopt its own drug policy. No nation is legally required to follow the U.S. government’s dictates on drug prohibition. If Venezuela decided to legalize drugs, that would be its prerogative. By the same token, if the Venezuelan government has drug laws but declines to enforce them, that too is its prerogative. If the Venezuelan government decided to do nothing about drug cartels and drug gangs producing, selling, and exporting drugs, that also would be its prerogative. No nation-state has the legal duty to adopt the U.S. government’s decades-old racket of drug prohibition.

Thus, President Trump’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s use of their crooked, corrupt, deadly, and destructive drug-war racket to attack and bomb Venezuela will be as illegitimate as President Bush’s, the Pentagon’s, and the CIA’s bogus use of WMDs to attack Iraq. No nation-state has the legitimate authority to attack another nation state — and kill innocent people in the process — in the purported attempt to enforce its own morally bankrupt policy of drug prohibition.

As I pointed out last July —before Trump took steps to concoct the Venezuela crisis — Americans had better brace themselves for another foreign war — as a way to quell the MAGA rebellion over the Jeffrey Epstein files. If that was, in fact, why Trump concocted this crisis, his strategy has worked brilliantly. Excited over the prospect of a regime-change war against Venezuela, Trump’s MAGA supporters have forgotten their Epstein rebellion, and, for all practical purposes, their rebellion is over. The Epstein files will remain secret.

And make no mistake about it: If Trump uses the drug war to launch a regime-change war against Venezuela, America will slide even further into authoritarianism. But of course, that’s what some people would call making America great again.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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As we come to the end of this series, there is time for one final song for the unsung, a sort of swan song, a final elegy and eulogy for those unknown heroes and heroines whose passing from this life went unheeded and unheralded but who have been sung to their rest by ministering angels. Whereas those who have been the focus of the previous essays have all left their mark on history in the sense that their names are known to posterity, albeit not as well-known as they should be, this final song will be of the nameless ones, the vast majority of humankind, whose names have been completely erased from the historical record.

The nameless ones are those whose names are no longer legible on the weather-worn tombstones that mark their resting place. They lived, to be sure; they loved and were loved, we can assume; they might have had children who also had children of their own, and whose children’s children are oblivious of their ever having lived. Their sins are forgotten as are their virtues.

These nameless and unrecorded ones remind us that history comes in two forms. There is recorded history, which is documented and written about and studied, and there is unrecorded history, which is all that has ever happened in the past, known and unknown, documented and undocumented. The former is miniscule in relation to the latter, the mere tip of the historical iceberg.

These hidden heroes of Christendom, these nameless ones, are the saints who are known to God, if unknown to us. They are those who are forgiven by Him, if forgotten by us, who now enjoy His eternal Presence in Heaven. Having been good and faithful servants and soldiers in the Church Militant, they now enjoy their triumph in the Church Triumphant.

Who are they?

They are those who suffered for the Faith in times of persecution. They are the martyrs of the Early Church, who are not listed with the saints because their names are not known. They are those who hid priests during the Tudor Terror in England, putting their lives at risk, or those imprisoned or forced into exile because they would not abandon their faith.

They are the victims of plagues and the victims of war, whose lives were cut tragically short. They are those killed by guillotine, gulag, and gas chamber; and those incinerated by the bombs of blitzkrieged London, carpet-bombed Dresden, and atomic-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And then there are those humble souls who lived quiet uneventful lives in relatively quiet and uneventful times. They are the simple laborers in the vineyard, the sowers of seeds, the shepherds, and the craftsmen. They are the meek who inherited nothing but the earth in which they were laid.

Perhaps these musings on unsung heroes should conclude with a brief meditation on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, the burial site of a World War I soldier whose remains were unidentifiable. It is right and just (dignum et justum est) that Caesar should honor the unknown warrior in this way; but it is much more right and just that Christ should honor those unknown heroes who have fought the good fight through so many centuries.

If Christ so honors these humble souls by raising them from the tomb into His Kingdom in Heaven, it is surely incumbent upon us to honor them also. In doing so, and in doing what they did, we might hope to be where they are. Through their prayers and by the grace of God, we might hope to join the unsung heroes of Christendom in the song of songs that never ends.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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Readers will be aware that Murray Rothbard conceptualized all rights as property rights, derived from the principle of self-ownership. His concept of individual liberty was thus rooted in the defense of private property rights. This is not to say that he disregarded other philosophical perspectives in which the defense of individual liberty plays a central role. On the contrary, as Sheldon Richman has observed, Rothbard’s own political philosophy encompassed a wide range of perspectives on liberty:

Rothbard took obvious delight in exploring the foundations and ramifications of liberty across disciplines. For him, individual liberty was a single gem with many facets: economic, historical, sociological, political-ethical. A scholar can set his sights on one or another facet, but for Rothbard, something is lost if one neglects the whole gem.

This appreciation for a broader defense of liberty is on full display in Rothbard’s “A Strategy for the Right,” in which he struck a celebratory note describing his “return home to the Right-wing, after 35 years in the political wilderness.” In this 1992 address to the John Randolph Club, Rothbard highlighted the value of forming political coalitions in the defense of liberty, especially with traditional conservatives on the “Old Right” who recognized that a government with unlimited power to intervene in the lives of citizens can only ever be a tyrannical government. The Old Right stood resolutely against what Rothbard called “the power elite” who posed the gravest threat to individual liberty.

Rothbard defined the power elite as “the bureaucrats, politicians, and special interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested, and lobby and are active twenty-four hours a day” when ordinary citizens are preoccupied with “the daily business of life, on making a living, being with his family, seeing his friends, etc.” It is precisely because those on the right have little time to devote to politics that forming coalitions in pursuit of common goals becomes important.

This is not, of course, to say that there are no important differences between libertarians and all who travel under the banner of “conservatives.” Nevertheless, Rothbard recognized that although “there were many differences within the framework of the Old Right,” traditional conservatives shared in common the desire to defend the individual from the tyranny of the Leviathan state and from the machinations of Neo-Marxist court intellectuals whose role is to legitimize state power.

From a different perspective, the conservative intellectual historian Richard Weaver also highlighted the importance of joining in common cause with those who defend liberty from different philosophical perspectives. Weaver was a great defender of property rights, and David Gordon has described Weaver’s book Ideas Have Consequences as a brilliant defense of property rights and “one of the founding works of post-World War II American conservatism.” In his essay “Conservatism and Libertarianism: The Common Ground,” Weaver advances an argument very similar in key respects to Rothbard’s “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”—the argument that individual liberty is an essential attribute of human nature and that no defense of individual liberty can be successful if it operates at the level of high theory in disregard for human nature and the reality of the human condition. Weaver argues:

It is my contention that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire…this structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point.

Weaver, like Rothbard, was critical of the progressive radical who revolts against reality, whom he described as “the radical [who] makes his will the law, instead of following the rules of justice and prudence. Fancying that his dream or wish can be substituted for the great world of reality, he gets into a fix from which some good conservative has to rescue him.” This explains the conservative opposition to the progressive radical:

[The radical’s] first thought now is to get control of the state to make all men equal or to make all men rich, or failing that to make all men equally unhappy. This use of political instrumentality to coerce people to conform with his dream, in the face of their belief in a real order, is our reason, I think, for objecting to the radical.

Weaver rejected egalitarian schemes, which he rightly understood to be an excuse for vesting increasing power in the state. He saw the conservative rejection of egalitarianism and the commitment to reality as an important common point between libertarians and conservatives, emphasizing that human nature and human action are the key to understanding reality:

Praxeology, briefly defined, is the science of how things work because of their essential natures. We find this out not by consulting our wishes but by observing them. For example, I believe it is a praxeological law that a seller will always try to get as much as he can for what he has to sell, and a buyer will always try to pay as little as he can to get it. That is a law so universal that we think of it as part of the order of things. Not only is this law a reliable index of human behavior; it also makes possible the free market economy, with its extremely important contribution to political freedom.

These points of common interest between libertarian and conservative thought—while they do not by any means represent a uniform philosophical worldview—help to reinforce the strength of the political defense of liberty. The same applies to the defense of individualism within both traditions, even though here the divergence between the two worldviews becomes sharper. In his essay, “Two Types of American Individualism,” Weaver rejected the individualism which is reflected in “denying our responsibilities to our fellow men” through the type of “isolationism” for which Henry David Thoreau is admired. Instead, Weaver defended an individualism that is “more tolerant and circumspective,” that is not radical but, on the contrary, is rooted in human nature and offers “our best hope for preserving human personality in a civil society.” Weaver’s individualism draws upon a political philosophy that stands against “the forces of regimentation [and] totalitarianism” and is most powerfully expressed in the doctrine of states’ rights.

The standard bearer for this view of individualism is John Randolph of Roanoke, whose political philosophy was firmly realist in the Rothbardian sense, Weaver observing that, “His attitude was one of scorn for those who evade reality.” Randolph defended states’ rights as a doctrine that “in his mind constituted the anchor of liberty.” For Randolph, states’ rights stood as a bulwark against federal coercion, thereby safeguarding the individual citizen from the tyrannical centralization of government power. Weaver described Randolph as an “ultra-individualist,” an independent thinker who “was a follower neither of men’s opinions nor their fortunes, and he did not feel that a bold utterance needed apology.” In Randolph’s political philosophy, individualism was rooted in the social and political context of time and place. Weaver explains:

Individualism is a rejection of presumptive control from without. But Randolph never lost sight of the truth expressed in Aristotle’s dictum that man is a political animal. His individualism is, therefore, what I am going to call “social bond” individualism. It battles unremittingly for individual rights, while recognizing that these have to be secured within the social context… Randolph could not visualize men’s solving political questions through simple self-isolation.

Randolph wanted the locus of power to be as close as possible to those who would be affected by political decisions. He saw this as the most effective way to maximize the scope of individual liberty, arguing that, “Government to be safe and to be free must consist of representatives having a common interest and a common feeling with the represented.” Hence, Weaver argues that, “Randolph deserves to be called a political conservative individualist for two reasons…his belief in the limited though real role of government, and his defense of the smaller but ‘natural’ unit against the larger one which pretends a right to rule.”

This is a concept of individual liberty that treats “the relation of the individual to the state” as instrumental in ensuring as large as possible a scope for individual liberty. In this defense of natural rights, individual liberty, and states’ rights, Randolph helped to forge the foundations of the philosophical tradition which Rothbard celebrated in his “return home to the Right-wing.”

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