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Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

Libertarian Canadian attorney/podcaster Viva Frei called the murder of Charlie Kirk a preemptive presidential assassination. Frei reposted actor James Woods’ post on X that the TPUSA founder was destined to be the US president. Although Kirk would not be eligible age-wise to be president until the 2032 election, I think this is true. He delivered several million Gen Z voters to President Trump, the deciding factor in his victory.

I don’t think there’s any doubt it was a preemptive presidential assassination. https://t.co/TipT3WqzxL

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) November 28, 2025

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The post One of America’s Biggest Gold Wholesalers Exposes the Most Common Gold Scam Enslaving the Country appeared first on LewRockwell.

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) was patting itself on the back with gusto last week in publicizing it is prosecuting alleged drug kingpin Zhi Dong Zhang upon his extradition from Mexico. The prosecution is a really big deal in the US government’s effort to win the war on drugs according to the assertions of several government employees in the DOJ press release.

In reality, the hoopla is just more “blah, blah, blah” in support of a destructive drug war that continues to cause much harm while failing to achieve its stated objectives including the reduction of drug use and threats to safety.

“The defendant stands accused of running a global enterprise that pumped massive quantities of cocaine, fentanyl, and methamphetamine into our communities and laundered millions in narcotics proceeds,” said US Deputy Attorney General Todd W. Blanche in the press release. Further commented Blanche, “His return to the United States is a major step in dismantling a network that has fueled addiction, violence, and death.”

US Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. seconded Blanche’s assessment that Zhang is a drug kingpin whose prosecution is a big deal in the US government’s drug war. Nocella stated, “As alleged, the defendant is a leader of one of the most prolific drug trafficking and money laundering organizations in the world who, together with his co-conspirators, imported thousands of kilograms of narcotics, including cocaine and methamphetamine, into the United States and other countries.” The prosecution of Zhang, further stated Nocella, “will hold him responsible for the great harm he has caused.”

US Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg jumped in with a similar assessment regarding the prosecution. He is quoted in the press release commenting that “Zhang’s transnational network was allegedly intricate, well-coordinated, and well-funded” and that “through the great work of dedicated law enforcement agencies and valued cooperation from our international partners, Zhang’s poison pipeline has been shut off.”

Police involved in the case similarly commented in the press release. Ricky J. Patel of Homeland Security Investigations asserted that the arrest of Zhang “marks a decisive blow against the ruthless criminal enterprises responsible for flooding our streets with cocaine, meth and deadly fentanyl.” Robert J. Murphy from the Drug Enforcement Administration claimed that the arrest of Zhang “represents a critical milestone in a long-running investigation into an alleged high-level narcotics trafficker with international reach.” Further pledged Murphy, “We will continue to follow the evidence and the money until the leadership of these organizations is dismantled.”

For someone with limited familiarity with the US drug war, these statements may be convincing that a major victory in the “war” is being accomplished that will lead to a diminishing of drug use and problems associated with it. However, the truth is very different. People who have followed the US war on drugs know that the comments of the various government employees in the press release are just a bunch of “blah, blah, blah” that can be ignored. Been there, done that. The US government has indicted and convicted many kingpins over the decades without it reducing drug use, helping drug users, or making America safer or more free. Rather, these and other enforcement efforts encompassed in the drug war have contributed to increased dangers for drug users and have, as libertarian communicator Ron Paul has been arguing for decades, made America more dangerous and less free while failing to reduce the supply of drugs.

In his February of 2014 Future of Freedom Foundation editorial “Yawn. Another Big Drug Bust,” Jacob G. Hornberger laid out the logic and history of why it is wrong to think that the arrest, indictment, incarceration, or killing of a drug kingpin, be it Zhang last week or another such as Joaquin Guzman Loera at the time Hornberger wrote his editorial, will do anything to help the American people. “[B]usting a big drug lord or some drug gang reaps nothing but a lot of publicity for the drug warriors,” concluded Hornberger. It instead is part of a larger effort — the war on drugs — that causes many harms that people wrongly blame on drugs.

The path to a better America, concluded Hornberger, is to dispense with the whole drug war. It is also, wrote Hornberger, the path to getting rid of drug lords and drug cartels:

The irony is that there is but one way to put every single drug lord and drug cartel out of business immediately. It’s not by cracking down on them. That’s what drug legalization would do. The drug lords and drug cartels could not compete against private firms operating in legal free market. They’d be out of business the minute drugs were legalized.

Unfortunately, however, the drug warriors simply will not embrace this solution to the drug war. They’d prefer to continue going the same route they have followed for more than 40 years, including having those much-ballyhooed drug busts.

The drug warriors will continue with their preening as supposed heroes so long as enough people believe the bogus claims. That is why it is important that people who know the harm brought by the drug war spread that knowledge and respond to the drug warriors’ boasts of “successes” with counterargument, condemnation, and ridicule. Then may come a day when the drug warriors recede from power and this terrible “war” finally ends.

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post The DOJ is Prosecuting a Drug Kingpin, Blah, Blah, Blah appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yesterday, a thing happened, and because I did not immediately post about this thing that happened, some angry internet person complained about what he believes to be my hypocrisy or my indifference as to this thing that happened.

Ordinarily I strive to ignore angry internet people, but sometimes they inspire entire essays, and this is one of those times. You want me to post about the thing, butthurt internet person? Okay, I’ll post about the thing.

You may not like what I’m going to post, but I’m going to post it anyway, because now I need to get all of this off my chest.

The thing that happened, is that an American living in Berlin had his house raided by the police and his computer confiscated, all because he published a book with a swastika on the cover:

A court had previously convicted the same man for tweeting the cover art from this selfsame book with the selfsame swastika.

Things like this happen because Section 86a of the German criminal code forbids disseminating the slogans and symbols of “unconstitutional organisations,” and the swastika is one such slogan or symbol. 86a is a stupid outdated law and it needs to go away because nobody deserves to be prosecuted or investigated for propaganda offences, however personally abrasive, politically misguided and intellectually lazy he may be.

I’ll say that again even more clearly, lest you mistake me:

What authorities are doing to this man is wrong and he doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve this even though he’s demonstrated incredible imprudence in this instance and in others too. He doesn’t deserve this even though he is himself eager to accuse me and others of imaginary National Socialist tendencies, much like the German speech police themselves. And he doesn’t deserve this even though he is on record approving of Section 86a of the German criminal code, the very law that is being used to persecute him. However much he may challenge our sympathy, however incurably myopic his beliefs, this man doesn’t deserve what is happening to him.

At the same time, you need to know that my posting about this stuff isn’t going to stop it. I don’t have any answers here, and I don’t have any power either. It’s not like the more words Eugyppius throws at this problem, the harder the job of the speech police will be. These guys actually seek out publicity; they’re proud of what they’re doing. Here they are having a laugh about it on American national television:

Nevertheless, I’ve posted and posted and posted and posted about speech repression in Germany, so angry butthurt internet people will have to forgive me for being a little late to respond to the all-hands-on-deck outrage alarm in this particular case.

What is happening to our American friend in Berlin is bad but it’s also pretty middle-of-the-road as far as German speech harassment goes. Lots of Germans have been punished much more heavily for doing much less, and I’ve carefully catalogued almost every single case that has made it into the press over the years.1 As far as I know, I’m the only person doing this in English at all. Most speech police victims don’t get any write-ups in the Atlantic. Matt Taibbi doesn’t give them interviews and Die Zeit could care less about them.

So I’m really, sincerely sorry that an American got caught up in this stupid shit. Germany has become a scary and unpredictable place because it is ruled by hapless insecure morons who can’t handle even the mildest criticism. Our well-meaning antiracist liberal is not being singled out for unusual repressions; everybody in Germany who types things into the internet, whether he realises it or not, exposes himself to this selfsame risk. I’ve rearranged many aspects of my life to account for this risk. I try not to spend more than a few weeks in the same place, I avoid all real-life events associated with my online persona, and I wake up every morning at 5am to ensure that I’m logged out of everything and that all of my devices are powered off in advance of any 6am police raid to seize my electronic devices. (It’s not that bad, I use this time for some pleasant early-morning reading.)

From its inception in 1949, the Federal Republic has always had illiberal speech laws. The state has become particularly repressive since Covid, but the authoritarian streak is not new. When I lived in the United States, these illiberal aspects of the German state occasionally came up in conversation. My American colleagues regarded them as mild curiosities, as potentially regrettable but also understandable in light of German history. In this their assessments mirrored those of our American friend, who spoke as follows during his speech crime trial in January 2024:

Hopkins underscored that he was all in favour of the law in question. “I like this law. I don’t want Nazis to wave swastika flags in the streets of Berlin. I am a free speech absolutist, but I make an exception in this case to account for Germany’s particular history.” He said that it had been obvious that he had used the swastika in his tweets to oppose Nazism, to oppose totalitarianism and to warn his readers about it. He then asked the court that, if it had to convict him, to at least admit that his prosecution was about him opposing pandemic measures and not to fight people who sympathise with the Nazis as per the actual spirit of the law. In his well worded — if overly long — statement, he alleged pretty openly that the court would be working as part of a totalitarian system, and not in the name of democracy, if it were to convict him.

The narrow point to make here, is that 86a specifically is not the statute that keeps Nazis off Berlin streets. The German state has other tools for that. 86a has a much broader purpose, namely to prevent the normalisation of symbols and slogans associated with “unconstitutional organisations.” There have been no misunderstandings here; the Berlin prosecutors have not mistaken our American for a neo-Nazi. They have simply identified him as a swastika normaliser, because his use of the swastika did not make his rejection of the symbol immediately apparent. That’s dumb, but it’s the same standard applied in many other cases too. Below, I’ll talk about the big-picture strategy behind prosecutions like this, because obviously not even the German state is that interested in wholly suppressing the defunct trappings of Nazi propaganda. The narrow motivations of Berlin prosecutors are simpler, and we can get those out of the way right now. There is just a lot of pressure to prosecute as many internet speech crimes as possible in current-year Germany. The game is to maximise the numbers and go after everybody they can because they believe the internet is a bad dangerous place and they want people to invest less of their lives in unapproved online discourse. Berlin prosecutors also seem to have a personal, punitive agenda in this case, which explains the totally unnecessary raid and device seizure. Probably they’re assblasted over the negative publicity our American generated in the course of his first trial. We’ve seen these kinds of prosecutorial vendettas before, for example in the case of Stefan Neihoff.

Of course the broader point to make here is about the wisdom of laws preventing “Nazis” from “wav[ing] swastika flags in the streets of Berlin” more generally, because while 86a isn’t the precise wrench for this bolt, it is part of a bigger statutory (and constitutional) toolkit that includes this among its purposes. Aside from a few thousand totally irrelevant lunatics – no few of whom are probably federal agents – there are no longer any self-proclaimed Nazis in Germany. As long as these laws are on the books, they are therefore an invitation for the state to go out and find people whom state agents deem to be Nazis because they believe their words and opinions are worthy of repression. The state decides here – not me, not any American satirist, and not anybody else. It could be that 90% of the time, you agree that these hypothetical flag-wavers need to be tried for political crimes. Otherwise, you just have to accept that the state is going to go after people whose speech and opinions you’d prefer to see protected. That is the expense of defensive democracy. Speech crime prosecutions for sarcastic use of the swastika, the stress of living in this retarded police system, the fact that they can come after you for anything – all of these are what you have to pay for the extravagance of a law that you believe may disadvantage your imaginary political enemies.

This brings us to the Nazi Cult. To justify the repression of its critics, the state must withdraw National Socialism from its historical context and reconstruct this defunct party and ideology as a timeless spectre haunting the Federal Republic. Anything the state doesn’t like or that state actors find threatening or merely unpalatable or tiresome must be forced into the Nazi mould. Thus Nazism becomes a plastic thing, infinitely malleable, reconstructed and adjusted in the moment according to whatever it is establishment politicians, leading media pundits and NGO activists don’t like. “Racism” makes you a Nazi, opposing mass migration makes you a Nazi, voting for the AfD makes you a Nazi, Euroscepticism might make you a Nazi, and opposition to regime side projects like the energy transition or pandemic prevention makes you various flavours of “denier,” which is analogous to denying the Holocaust, which is what Nazis do. Our dyspeptic American is an eager participant in the Nazi Cult; he too sees Nazis everywhere, and in this way he feeds the cult that is presently causing him so much trouble.

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President Donald Trump threatens to hang military officers who have the audacity to tell their troops not to obey unlawful orders. Trump called them ‘traitors’ and suggested they be locked up.

The president just crossed the Rubicon. Formerly his language was amusing TV banter. Now, after these threats, he has gone way too far. Americans should be alarmed.

I enlisted in the US Army in 1969 to become an infantry officer and served in Vietnam. At the time, I foolishly thought this colonial war was just part of our American way of life.

In basic and advanced infantry training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, we were educated in the military code of conduct, the legal system underlying the conduct of soldiers.

The most important single lesson that I vividly recall was the order to refuse any orders seen as illegal – that is, in violation of US law and the Geneva Conventions. This command did not come out of the blue. It was promulgated as a result of the Nuremburg Trials after World War II in which much of the senior German elite was found guilty of war crimes, and many sentenced to death.

Most of the German officials and soldiers being tried for assorted war crimes claimed they were simply following orders from senior commanders. That is why the Nuremburg prosecutors developed the idea of sweeping aside the senior officer command defense.

The Nuremberg Trials were in many ways legalized revenge on a defeated enemy. Particularly so when the victorious allies included the US Air force and RAF who had killed millions of civilians in Europe and Japan, and the Soviets who had killed millions more innocent civilians.

Nuremburg was a gigantic kangaroo court, and legalized revenge killings. But the one good thing that came out of it was the rejection of the “I was only following orders” defense. All wars are a crime, but this new statute slightly reduced some of the horrors and murder involved.

President Trump now wants to sweep this protection away because he feels his regal authority powers have been challenged. This is a violation of our constitution and laws. Just as illegal, it raises the constitutional ban on bills of attainder, an act whereby the government singles out an individual for a particular crime and prosecutes him without a proper trial.

This column has long said that all presidents should be military veterans. It’s too bad Donald Trump managed to evade military service (just when I was serving my country) or he would have a better understanding of this important issue and the legal and customary restraints imposed on his noble office.

Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com.

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If recent years are any indication, this year we’ll be treated, yet again, to a smattering of articles about the supposed politics behind Thanksgiving, and how the bad guys (whether on the left or right) are opposing all things decent by refusing to celebrate the holiday in a way that promotes the correct political agenda. On one side are the leftists who feel compelled to use Thanksgiving as an extension of Columbus Day, in which we’re all reminded that it’s a bad thing to steal from indigenous tribes. One the other side are the conservatives who insist on making Thanksgiving into a day celebrating a national origin story. July 4, it seems, isn’t enough for them.

Unfortunately, both of these efforts at hijacking the holiday for political battles refuse to go away. Fortunately, it appears that the vast majority of Americans don’t care, and most plan to enjoy the holiday in the way it has been enjoyed for about 150 years: as a celebration on domestic life and economic prosperity.

The Evolution of Thanksgiving 

As a holiday, Thanksgiving has gone through several different forms. As described in James Baker’s study of the holiday, Thanksgiving: The Biography of An American Holiday, there had been a variety of Thanksgiving traditions practiced throughout the US, but few of them closely resembled the Thanksgiving we now know today.

Moreover, the activities people adopted to commemorate the holiday changed significantly over time. According to Baker, in the holiday’s early years, it served as ”the Puritan stand-in for Christmas (a holiday they rejected as noncanonical and pagan), an early winter time for feasting and pious hope before the long, dreary months of cold and privation to follow.”

While a large meal was often had at the celebration, the holiday was mostly religious in character. The “highlight” of the day was a long, stern sermon, presumably from a Calvinist clergyman.

The holiday had long been celebrated in New England and other regions as a sort of harvest festival, but it did not commonly involve any narratives about Pilgrims. That sort of thing was reserved for “Forefather’s Day” which had its own commemoration in New England on December 21. Needless to say, the rest of the country — especially those with little connection to New England — did not enthusiastically celebrate the establishment of the Plymouth Colony.

Indeed, the use of tales about the Pilgrims’ “first Thanksgiving” did not become a widespread practice until the 1900s. It was a complete invention of the public schools which then, as now, spent precious little time on academic skills in favor or concentrating on endless hours of busywork and cultural indoctrination. According to Baker:

[T]he inculcation of those Thanksgiving images in generations of schoolchildren was probably a major factor behind the ultimate success of the Pilgrim Thanksgiving iconography. This familiar cycle was not an important part of American education before the end of the nineteenth century. There had been earlier holiday activities for kids and children’s books such as Hamilton’s Red-Letter Days in Applethorpe (1866) that explained the basis for holiday observances, but the complete subsumption of the civic calendar into the school curriculum was the result of a new progressive approach to education that paralleled the contemporary impulse to create new holidays for everything from labor and flags to birds and trees. This grammar school adaptation of civic ritual not only exposed students to the lessons of “Americanism” but also turned traditional holiday stories such as that of the Pilgrims into children’s fare.

By the time the public schools were turning the holiday into a day about Pilgrims, though, the annual rituals of Thanksgiving — which persist to this day — had been established quite independently from the political agenda. Far from being a national day to celebrate “forefathers” or the Plymouth Colony, Thanksgiving had already become a celebration of domestic life and family fun.

The Rise of Thanksgiving as a Domestic, Consumer-based Holiday 

In her history of Victorian America, The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas explains the transformation that took place as US culture moved away from the hard-nosed theology and philosophy of the 18th century, and toward something quite different.1 Baker notes:

As Ann Douglas has demonstrated, the middle-class women involved in this “domestic revolution” found ready allies among the liberal clergymen of the era, who had been deprived of the political and social clout of their established Puritan predecessors. Laying claim to the social conscience of their generation, they instituted a regime of “sentimental” values in place of the old Enlightenment no-nonsense rationality and the tough-minded, aggressive Calvinist theology of the previous era.

This domestic revolution that Douglas describes went hand-in-hand with the rise of Victorian culture in the United States. It combined with the new economy of mass production and mechanization to help create the nostalgic, sentimental, and consumption-fueled event we now think of as the Thanksgiving holiday in practice. The meal, the family gathering, and the domestic setting for celebration that are all now familiar were established in this Victorian period. The biggest change over the years has been the addition of football – first viewed in person and then on television – as an additional family activity.

The prosperity of the second half of the 19th century made it possible. Although the Gilded Age is today badmouthed as an era of working people suffered as Robber Barons ran factories with an iron fist, it was during this period that countless Americans were able to move out of poverty, and into the middle classes for the first time.

These changes made it easier for families to create a domestic experience with all the trimmings that Victorians valued — and which are now hallmarks of the standard American Thanksgiving celebration. Not only was food becoming more affordable for many, but more Americans could afford more and better versions of silverware, china, clothing, and furniture. They could afford more building supplies for nicer homes, and — as was happening in Europe as well — more workers could afford to actually take some time off to enjoy recreational team sports, a day at a park, and other pastimes.

Thanksgiving was no longer a religious holiday — in which Americans contemplated complex theological truth — and much more so a holiday of consumption, recreation, and the domestic life of home and family.

This new phenomenon of buying mass-produced goods to augment one’s domestic enjoyment expanded into the early 20th century, so that by the 1920s, Thanksgiving was looking more and more like a holiday geared around buying things.

Baker continues:

A new holiday event emerged in the 1920s—the Thanksgiving Day parade. Strictly speaking, Thanksgiving parades are not about Thanksgiving at all but Christmas, yet they do provide a Thanksgiving Day activity that is enjoyed by millions of Americans in person or on TV. … The first Thanksgiving parade was put on by the Gimbel Brothers Department Store in Philadelphia on November 25, 1920. It consisted of fifty people, fifteen cars, and a fireman dressed as Santa Claus who marched in the parade and then entered the Gimbels Toy Department by a ladder. The central feature of the Gimbels Thanksgiving Parade, like all similar parades, was the “official arrival of Santa Claus” in his most marketable guise as patron saint of holiday commerce.

Of course, department stores were themselves a creation of Victorian culture, first in England, and later in the United States. In terms of economics, they offered a higher standard of living for their customers and they offered many goods not available anywhere else. And what goods they did have were often at lower prices than at smaller stores. On a cultural level, the department stores were important as well. They offered unprecedented freedom for women who could use the department stores as a safe place to meet with others in public places, unescorted by men. Employment at these stores also offered many young women an escape from farm work and factory work. And, of course, for the primary managers of the household budget — which is what many middle class Victorian women were — department stores offered a new, clean, and comfortable place to do business.

Thus, it’s no wonder that our modern practice of Thanksgiving is so wrapped up with the Victorian version of the holiday. It sprang from the 19th-century spread of consumer goods — and the social freedoms that came with them. The Thanksgiving that we know, and which most of our grandparents knew, is a an apolitical holiday formed around the modern world of relative plenty made possible by the modern industrialized economy.

Don’t expect any of these facts to stop the crusaders who will try to ruin the holiday with lots of talk about “the first Thanksgiving” and whether it was a Holy Meal or a prelude to genocide. For 150 years, Thanksgiving has really been about sitting around with friends and family, and eating a very large meal. This is one thing we shouldn’t let the culture warriors take away from us.

—

1 I examine Douglas’s book at greater length in my book Commmie Cowboys, and note how the post-world-War-II Western film was a rejection of the domestic, bourgeois lifestyle that had been promoted during the Victorian era in America. 

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It should be damn obvious that the current blistering AI bubble is setting up Wall Street, the US economy and Trump-O-Nomics for a thundering bust. The AI frenzy has now gotten so out of kilter that fully $140 billion or 76% of the $184 billion gain in real GDP during the first half of 2025 was accounted for by feverishly surging investments in AI-oriented GPUs, network gear, server farms and data centers.

Moreover, this AI investment surge, which is expected to annualize to more than $425 billion in 2025, has been on a literally explosive growth trajectory. According to Grok 3, the comparable annual AI investment spending levels for 2022, 2023 and 2024 in the US were $104 billion, $179 billion and $250 billion, respectively. That is, the projected 2025 annual rate of AI spending will be up by 4.1X from just three year ago.

Of course, when you back out this AI investment explosion from the overall US investment spending numbers, what’s left is pretty punk. To wit, non-AI investment in US equipment and intellectual property in the fourth quarter of 2024 totaled $2.586 trillion, which figure rose by only $31.9 billion as of Q2 2025. So the annualized rate of gain was just 2.4% during the 2025 first half—a level far below the 12.2% annual gain in the AI-swollen BEA figure for total US equipment and intellectual property (first line) investment.

In short, what is propping up the entire main street economy is an immense speculative surge in AI investment spending that isn’t remotely sustainable because it’s based on a fevered stock market bubble, fueled by the Fed’s printing presses. And for want of doubt, let us remind what the real GDP and its major components looked like during the first half of 2025, excluding the AI investment eruption.

Annual Rate Of Change, Q4 2024 to Q2 2025:

• Real consumption spending (PCE): +1.54%.
• Government sector: -0.54%.
• Housing construction: -3.10%.
• Exports:-0.90%.
• Imports:+1.20%.
• Equipment and intellectual property investment, less AI: +2.40%.
• Business structures: -1.56%.
• Total Real GDP Less AI: +0.38%

So the question recurs. What happens when (not if) the AI bubble crashes. The sheer certainty of the latter is due to the fact that the runaway stock market is generating so much artificial capital that the AI-oriented hyperscalers are operating straight out of the playbook of the late 1990s dotcom bubble. That is, they are injecting huge amounts of capital into start-ups, smaller customers and linked vendors in their supply chain eco-systems, thereby enabling the latter to buy from these same high flyers massive amounts of chips, network equipment, other gear and software for data centers and server farms. NVIDIA, Microsoft etc. can then report soaring sales and stupendous profits. That is, until the bubble finally bursts.

Needless to say, today’s AI spending eruption starkly parallels the fiber optics and telecom network spending frenzy during the dot-com bubble (late 1990s to early 2000s). Back then, telecom companies vastly overbuilt fiber-optic networks to meet booming anticipated internet demand, fueled by speculative valuations and easy capital. When soaring demand projections failed to materialize, many fiber suppliers, telecoms and network equipment suppliers ended up in bankruptcy or suffered severe stock price declines.

For want of doubt, here is a review of the major fiber-optic suppliers and related telecom equipment companies that were central to the dot-com era’s investment boom and which also experienced bubble-scale stock price surges—only to crash spectacularly between 2000–2002. These firms supplied fiber cables, networking gear and infrastructure for the internet backbone.

Corning Incorporated…was a leading global supplier of optical fiber and cables, which were critical for telecom networks. Its stock peaked at $113 per share in September 2000 on the back of a doubling of revenues from $3 billion in 1998 to nearly $8 billion during the June 2001 LTM period. Thereafter, of course, revenues cratered back to $3 billion by December 2003, while the modest $550 million of net income that had been posted in 1999 plunged to nearly a $6 billion loss by the March 2003 LTM period. While Corning Inc. ultimately survived, the dotcom crash caused its employment level of 40,000 in 2000 to plunge to 20,000 by December 2003, while its capex level $2.1 billion per year at the peak fell to just $280 million by September 2003.

JDS Uniphase…was the dominant provider of fiber-optic components (e.g., lasers, transceivers) for network equipment. Its market cap hit $153 billion in 2000 on peak sales of $4 billion, thereby reflecting an absurd 38X market cap-to-sales multiple. During the following year sales plunged by 35% and the company was forced to book a $56 billion net loss which included $45 billion of goodwill write-downs on its extended string of over-priced acquisitions. Thereafter sales fell to less than $2 billion by 2002 before its remnants were merged into successor companies.

Lucent Technologies…was the Western Electric division spin-off in 1995 from AT&T. On the back of its monopoly supplier position in the Ma Bell system, Lucent had become the nation’s dominant supplier of telecom equipment, including fiber-optic systems and switches. Its stock peaked at $84 per share after its pre-spin-off revenues nearly doubled to $38 billion by FY 2000. But when the tech bubble collapsed, revenues plunged to less than $16 billion, which generated huge losses and a 99% crash of its high flying stock to $0.55 and an eventual bankruptcy filing. Subsequent to its bankruptcy filing its remnants were acquired by Alcatel in 2006 after heavy losses.

Nortel Networks…was a key player in fiber-optic networking gear and telecom infrastructure. Its market cap reached $400 billion in 2000 based on peak annual revenues of $30 billion, again implying a still absurd market cap-to-revenue ratio of 13X. By the time of its bankruptcy filing in 2009, when its assets were mostly liquidated, revenues had dropped by 92% to $2.4 billion.

Ciena Corporation….. supplied optical networking systems for long-haul fiber networks. The company’s stock hit $151 per share in 2000 and then fell to less than $5 by 2002 on the back of collapsing financials. Thereafter, the company required more than a decade to recover by focusing on optical transport products.

Global Crossing…..built and operated transoceanic fiber-optic networks. It was valued at $47 billion in 1999 before falling to less than $70 million. Upon filling for bankruptcy in 2002, its remnants were acquired by Level 3.

Level 3 Communications…was another major fiber-optic network operator and bandwidth provider. Its stock peaked at $132 per share in 2000. After dropping to $1 in 2002, it was reorganized in bankruptcy and later acquired by CenturyLink (Lumen).

In short, during the 1998–2000 boom telecoms were spending about $100 billion annually on fiber cables and internet infrastructure, expecting exponential internet growth. Suppliers like Corning and JDS Uniphase saw revenue spikes but overcapacity led to a crash when the hordes of dot-com start-ups and internet users failed. Consequently, global fiber-optic demand fell about 80% from the 2000 peak, with $2 trillion in market cap erased across telecoms and their suppliers.

Needless to say, the crash in the telecom/internet capex sector left a huge hole in overall US fixed investment in business equipment and intellectual property. In constant 2003 dollars, business investment (excluding structures) had climbed by 33% from a $930 billion annual rate in Q3 1996 to a peak of $1.250 trillion by Q3 2000.

Yet by Q1 2003 total US capex in equipment and intellectual property had dropped by more than $200 billion. That is to say, when you take a -16% bite out of real capital investment even government stimmy spending is hard pressed to keep total GDP above the flat-line.

Of course, the associated drop in the stock market capitalization was even more dramatic. The aggregate value of the S&P 500 peaked at $12.7 trillion in March 2000, but then plunged by $5.2 trillion or -41% to $7.5 trillion at the September 2002 bottom.

Likewise, during the Great Recession collapse of 2008-2009, the S&P 500 peaked at $13.5 trillion in June 2007 and then fell by $6.6 trillion or –49% to $6.9 trillion at the March 2009 bottom.

But here’s the thing, today’s market cap of the S&P 500 is both far higher than in these earlier crashes, but also far more concentrated in the top 10 names, consisting heavily of the AI high flyers. Thus, at the present time fully 41% of the total S&P 500 market cap is accounted for by just 10 stocks, as we itemize below.

On the other hand, the level of market capitalization exposed to a potential meltdown of the AI bubble is an order of magnitude higher. The S&P 500 market cap recently weighed in at $56 trillion, representing another $4 trillion gain from the chart line shown below as of a few weeks ago.

Accordingly, the S&P 500 market cap is now 4.4X larger than it was at the dotcom peak and 4.2X larger than on the eve of the Financial crisis. Were the impending AI bubble crash to come in at an average of the two prior stock market meltdowns, a -45% plunge would shave $25 trillion of value from the stock market.

We think there is every chance in the world that the top 10 stocks which now account for 41% of the total S&P value will experience thundering meltdowns in the quarters ahead, taking the entire stock market with them. The degree of over-valuation is simply out of this world, starting with NVIDIA Corp which despite its recent tick down is still capitalized at $4.6 trillion or 28X LTM sales.

This valuation is just plain bonkers, even if AI turns out to be the greatest invention since sliced bread. Critics note that 2025’s estimated $475 billion of global AI capex dwarfs actual AI- based revenues, which amounts to $3-5 billion at best. That is to say, there is as of yet no return on capital investment in sight, thereby risking a similar “dark pool” of unused capacity that plagued the telecom world after the dot-com crash.

Needless to say, a collapse of the AI high flyers would also have a thundering impact on capex spending for equipment and intellectual property, which is the only thing holding real GDP above the flat-line. Again, the current scale tells you all you need to know:

• Dot-Com Crash: Capex of $1.189 trillion in Q4 2000 dropped by –$136 billion or -11.4% by Q1 2003.
• Financial Crisis: Q1 2008 peak spending for equipment and intellectual capital of $1.457 trillion, plunged by -$245 billion or nearly -17% by the Q1 2009 bottom.
• AI Boom: The current annualized run rate of equipment and intellectual property spending of $3.316 trillion is so extreme that it could readily drop by 20% in a downturn—especially given that AI spending of $425 billion this year represents an 100X gain since 2022. Yet a 20% reduction would result in a -$650 billion investment spending plunge—-a figure way off the charts of prior history.

US Fixed Investment Spending For Equipment and Intellectual Property, 1996 to 2025

It goes without saying that a $650 billion decline in capital spending would also plunge the already struggling US economy deep into the recessionary drink, and do so at a time when there is no policy margin for error. That is to say, fiscal policy is already tapped out with $38 trillion of public debt and the Fed’s printing presses have already implanted 40 year high inflation in the price level of the US economy.

We’d say that what is coming down the pike, therefore, does not look much like the ballyhooed Golden Age the Donald and his MAGAphones so foolishly expect.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post The Coming AI Bust: Why Trump-O-Nomics Is Riding a Time Bomb appeared first on LewRockwell.

Either the Zionist Jewish Lobby aka the Deep State owns the President and Congress, or they are both just being paid off.

The purpose of all my papers is to inform people of the truth and give them the information to correct the problems before we go into a death spiral.

But how do you inform Communists (citizens) in the inner cities that the insurrections they participate in will leave them starving in the streets with no one willing or able to deliver them sustenance? This population is ignorant of the facts, and there is no way to inform them. They must learn from experience and the tuition is exorbitant…starvation and death.

Don’t ask about the unelected Bureaucrats in the Administrative State. No one controls them, they think the government is theirs, and they just steal and do what they want. USAID was an  example. Are any of them in prison? Why not?

The FBI is there to keep our government employees and officials honest, but in over 100 years they have not. The FBI should be terminated for being complicit and ineffective. Failure of the FBI to apprehend criminals in government is why we have a government that is stealing us blind.

We really don’t need to ask these questions because we know that the President and Congress are “living High on the Hog” and we are not.  And we should be, as we are living in the richest country in the world.

As an Economist, I know many of the problems and  answers.  Essentially we have more than sufficient  resources to permit everyone who works to live in luxury . We should have the American  Dream for 20-somethings, requiring only one income. It now requires two incomes for 40-year olds, so no babies are born.

But those resources are being stolen to fund Foreign Aid, Genocide, Foreign Deployment of Troops, Social and Communist Programs, Wars for Profit, the Private Federal Reserve Bank, etc. Or, put in simple terms, most government expenses are funding an Unconstitutional Criminal Enterprise.

Our great lifestyle is being stolen through the preceding expenditures and more, and are then passed through to the Jewish Lobby aka Deep State aka Military Industrial Complex aka the Parasitic Super-Rich Ruling Class, Wealthy Families, and Elected Officials (President and Congress).

The plight of the American People and their state of mind is not that different from that of the French People when they brought on the French Reign of Terror.

Most people don’t realize that Socialism and Communism are parasitic and suck the life blood out of a country, and then it dies, leaving death and devastation. Non-productive Communists produce nothing, so resources given to them produce inflation and an unending spiral into poverty with no hope of recovery.

We must give President Trump credit for preventing a civil war and many great programs, but his failure to terminate expenses, operations, and institutions specified in this paper will destroy his good works and everything else

The post Will Americans Continue To Tolerate Living in Poverty To Fund Genocide and Wars for Profit? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The primary mechanism our society uses to determine one’s eventual wealth and place in the social hierarchy is their academic performance. As such, many put forward an incredible sustained effort to succeed at each rung of the academic ladder, and in many cases, at the urging of their parents, begin that effort from a very young age. However, while a variety of justifications exist for the society adopting this convention, there are also major issues with it, such as:

• Far too many who go through it and put in a sustained effort to “succeed” end up with nothing to show for it.

• Because education has essentially established a monopoly on moving up the social ladder (which forces everyday citizens to participate in its rat race), it has no incentive to provide quality education to those it trains—particularly since unconditional federal support (e.g., student loans) subsidizes education and is allotted based on how many students attend each institution, not the quality of the education offered.

• Education primarily focuses on telling you what to do, not how to do it. As a result, those with inherent talent do much better than their peers, whereas many of those who simply try to do what they are told to do fall short regardless of how much effort they put in.

• By making people believe they need to be “taught to learn” through copying what the teacher does rather than encouraging the natural learning capacity of each student to emerge, the educational process makes students lose their inherent ability to learn or think critically.

Note: a recent study found that throughout history, whenever there are periods of internal conflict, states have introduced education reform that is designed to indoctrinate citizens to accept the status quo.

As such, the primary function of schooling has become more and more dependent on conditions of subservience and conformity rather than creating a generation of creative critical thinkers who can solve the issues our country faces and innovate solutions that advance us into the future. This in turn, is both highly unfair to those who are put through the academic grinder (but not inherently suited for success within it) and an immense waste of national resources. For example, as the years go by, we keep spending more money on research and education:

Yet primary educational outcomes (e.g., literacy) keep worsening, and valuable scientific innovations keep becoming rarer:

Note: I believe one of the most significant issues with the profit-focused debasement of American education is that it’s lowered the quality of the graduates who can fill our society’s institutions, thus lowering the quality of those institutions.

Studying

The primary metric determining success in education is how effectively one can memorize testable material. As such, a lot of education is compelling students to “spend more time studying” and dole out a myriad of punishments for those students who did not study enough. This in turn, touches upon one of my favorite phrases:

Work smart, not harder.

In my case, I believe much of my academic success boiled down to three things:

• In junior high, while learning a foreign language, I accidentally figured out how to use the sleep cycle to quickly memorize a lot of information.

• Because I recognized the value of natural health at a very young age, I avoided most of the things within our society which impair the sleep cycle or cognitive function.

• Because of the previous two things, there was less pressure on me to always be studying. As a result, I had a lot more time available to think about what I was studying and look into related sources of information.

This final point is particularly important as it cuts to the heart of the problem.

Students are constantly put under an immense amount of pressure to learn a lot of material, and to address this immense task, everything else gets cut out, so more time can go into memorizing the material that is taught. However, by doing this, their learning becomes much less efficient, so even though more time is spent studying, much less is learned.

Understanding vs. Memorizing

In most cases, the best way to memorize a topic is to both understand it and to know the justification for why it was taught to you in the first place. However, in most cases neither (especially the latter) happens. For example, when interviewing medical students, colleagues and I have found it fairly rare for the interviewee to answer why they were taught a specific piece of information (even within the area of focus they highlighted in their personal statement).

Typically, people recall information by having it connect to something else they know. As such, when you study a subject, but also take the time to explore it and make sense of each thing that is connected to it, those mental connections form, and the knowledge transforms from something you can hopefully recall to something that you just know (or can quickly recall by thinking about a connected subject you have a deep grasp of).

Likewise, understanding the value of learning something both fosters those critical connections but simultaneously allows the information to become something much more real you can directly take ownership of rather than an abstract fact you struggle to pull back to you (which again makes it far easier to recall).

When a light is turned on with a switch, most people don’t want to understand everything that allows that to happen; they just want to know that turning a switch turns the light on.

This lack of conceptual understanding is particularly common in medical education, where students are bombarded with a firehose of information they are expected to somehow memorize. As a result, there’s very little time for anything else (e.g., understanding the basis for it). Worse still, the hierarchal nature of medical education actively disincentivizes doing anything besides trusting the information being taught (as questioning any medical dogma can lead to harsh sanctions for the student).

I’ve long suspected this is by design as it both prevents students from ever exploring contradictory information and simultaneously creates an immense psychological investment in the value of their education, which makes them quite reluctant to question if parts of it are wrong. In my eyes, both of these are essential for the indoctrination physicians undergo, as many of the things they are taught don’t actually make sense if you really think about them—hence motivating and ensuring there is never enough time to question the medical curriculum.

Likewise, even if a student is skeptical about what’s being taught, being conscious of it often requires them to simultaneously hold two separate world views within their mind, as graduating from medical training requires each doctor to effectively present the orthodox version of medicine. Since that’s already an immense task, it’s often simply not possible to also hold any other worldview in one’s mind.

Note: I know people who had extensive backgrounds in natural medicine (and a great deal of clinical success with it) who then went to medical school and completely abandoned those disciplines because it was not possible for them to also have enough space in their minds to hold both perspectives simultaneously.

Active and Passive Memorization

When I was in medical school, to make studying more “fun” I did the following:

1. I would often procrastinate studying the tested material by instead learning about an interesting related topic (e.g., a correlate within natural medicine).

2. I would often look for holes or fallacies in what was being taught to us.

3. For each exam, I would try to study in a different way from how I had previously and see how the results compared to each previous attempt.

The value of the first two approaches should make sense (e.g. because they fostered more connections to the memorized material and preserved my love of learning—rather than viewing the course work I faced as something to be afraid of). However, of these, I learned the most from the third approach.

Originally, my desire to try to study differently each time arose because I knew that each subsequent examination would be more challenging than the previous (as the coursework in medical school ramps up). However, before long, I realized it was quite interesting to observe how I learned and continually experiment with it (making the studying process more fun to go through), and as time went on, I gained many insights about the process for both myself and others. These included:

• Many aspects of your environment (e.g., the lighting or how coherent or incoherent the music you listen to is) can significantly impact your ability to process and retain information.

• Different people learn differently, so there is no one size fits all approach. For example, some people are visually oriented, some are primarily auditory, and some are kinesthetic. Each group typically learns best through that specific channel (e.g., listening to numerous lectures versus looking at the material and then drawing it out, etc.).

• Similarly, many different study aids exist that work only for some people but not others (e.g., many of my classmates prioritized using flashcards, but I never found them helpful for me). Unfortunately, people tend to assert what works for them is also the best for everyone else, and one of the most common mistakes I see students make is being compelled by their peers to utilize a studying approach which is not actually the best for them.

Note: one of the unfortunate changes I’ve witnessed in medical students over the last decades is an increasing reliance on external study tools (e.g., online videos or demanding precise study guides and practice questions from their teachers) rather than students creating their own study materials from the presented material. Since active learning is critical for long term retention, I believe this passivity with learning is highly counterproductive.

• While studying, if you make an effort to stay consciously aware of what is occurring inside you, you are much more likely to develop your effective learning method. Essentially, when you learn a concept, you can either be disconnected from it or acutely aware of what aspects of it you are unclear of and struggle to recall. At this point, you can actively focus on addressing those weak links in your understanding and recall of the concept (e.g., I found that I would sometimes have difficulty consistently remembering which thing something paired with, so I actively created my own mnemonics for topics where I saw those recall issues arose).
Note: there is an immense amount of complexity to this point (which gradually reveals itself as you pay more and more attention to how your mind integrates information).

• Similarly, being cognizant of what is going on in your body is extremely important. For example, many find that if they maintain some sort of connection to their body as they study (e.g., through a relaxed breathing exercise), their cognitive stamina and ability to retain information increases.

• Likewise, if your brain or your nervous system becomes overloaded, you will retain significantly more if you take a break (e.g., move around, exercise, do yoga, or take a nap) than you will if you just keep studying. Sadly, many students when they are overloaded, instead use medications like Adderal to keep going, which beyond being harmful to the brain, are less effective than simply giving the brain the breaks it needs.
Note: we have come to believe one of the reasons doctors are so resistant to learning new information is because the medical education system overloads their nervous system and hence impairs their capacity to learn new information. As such, I found that those who are the most open minded to new ideas, were typically those who found a way to avoid that cognitive burnout during their medical training.

• What you eat can significantly affect your ability to have a clear mind and study in an effective manner. In turn, a constant source of frustration for me has been finding medical students will typically eat lots of junk food while cramming for an exam, as this makes their studying process far less efficient. Likewise, healthy eating makes students much more able to effectively recall information when they are being tested on it for exams. As a learner, it is extremely important to assess if the foods you eat make your cognition clearer or if they dampen it (which sadly is the case for many of the addictive processed foods).
Note: inflammatory diets have been associated with cognitive decline and dementia, while anti-inflammatory diets have been show to prevent it.

• The specific position you study in can make a significant impact on how you learn. For instance, the default position most people study in is sitting up. Still, beyond putting significant strain on the body, it can gradually tighten the muscles in the neck, creating both headaches and fluid congestion from the brain (which often sneak up on a student as they aren’t cognizant of their body and hence do not pick up on the early signs of strain before they turn into something more severe that prevents studying). While opinions vary (as everyone is different), I believe the two best positions to study in are either squatting, or standing (especially if you can do so at a treadmill desk).

The key theme behind each of these points is that if you make the effort to actively engage in the studying process (rather than just passively trying to absorb the information being fed to you) and really question exactly what works and what does not work for you, you will be able to retain much more when you study (and have it be a much more enjoyable process).

Additionally, if you can figure out how to do this early in your academic career, it will pay dividends for a long time. For example, in addition to getting better grades, you will often be able to remember the information far into the future, whereas in contrast, I noticed many of my peers (who studied to pass tests rather than to create long term information retention) no longer recall many of the basic science concepts we learned at the start of medical school.

Note: many of the rules here also apply to general health, as since the guidelines we are fed are often so corrupt they cannot be trusted, obtaining health instead requires you to be conscious of what is going on within your own body and to then continually evaluate how each input you are exposed to improves or worsens it.

Read the Whole Article

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U.S. media are incapable of any truthful journalistic service. They are part of the problem.

Eighty years after the Nuremberg Trials prosecuted Nazi leaders for criminal aggression against nations, the Trump administration is blatantly doing the same against Venezuela. Yet there is not a word of condemnation in the U.S. media or among European allies.

In the past two months, more than 80 people have been killed by U.S. air strikes on over 20 civilian boats in the waters off the Latin American country. The Trump administration has provided no evidence to back up claims that these killings were carried out against alleged drug traffickers. They are extrajudicial executions, or murder.

This week, Trump has designated the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as the head of a foreign terrorist organization, an alleged narcotics cartel that is supposedly flooding the U.S. with drugs. Again, no evidence is provided. Venezuela dismissed the allegations as a ridiculous lie whose ulterior motive is the illegal use of U.S. military force for regime change in Caracas.

The pretext of combating the illicit drug trade should be seen as transparent. The largest deployment of U.S. military force in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is in itself a demonstration that the real agenda is not about interdicting drugs.

Venezuela’s role in narcotics trafficking to the United States is not significant compared with other Latin American countries, according to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime. Colombia and Peru are more important as cocaine sources. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has denoted Mexico as the biggest source of illicit fentanyl, which is responsible for most American overdose deaths.

The bigger picture is, of course, the objective to get rid of a socialist government in Venezuela and for the U.S. to gain control of the country’s vast oil reserves, the largest known reserves on the planet. Allied to that major reason is the desire in Washington to stymie China’s legitimate growing strategic partnerships across Latin America. As Donald Ramotar, the former president of Guyana, and other observers pointed out in a recent roundtable discussion sponsored by the Schiller Institute, the United States is flexing its muscles in its presumed “backyard” to try to restore its failing global power.

This should be obvious, as it is criminal. The United Nations Charter explicitly outlaws every aspect of Trump’s conduct towards Venezuela. Article 2:3 mandates that all disputes must be settled through peaceful means. Article 2:4 prohibits the use or threat of military force.

In other words, the Trump administration is clearly engaging in criminal aggression, the very conduct that the UN Charter was established in 1945 to banish after the horrific experience of Nazi crimes against peace that resulted in World War II.

This is where the U.S. news media are playing a particularly odious and time-dishonored role. The reporting by the mainstream media since Trump embarked on his aggression towards Venezuela has been an abysmal dereliction of duty to inform the public and hold government abuse of power to account.

With few exceptions, all the established news outlets in the U.S., including the New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, Axios, ABC, Newsweek, among others, have indulged the Trump administration’s claims and smears about Venezuela as a hub of “narco-terrorism”.

The U.S. media have promoted the calls made by Venezuela opposition figures, like the dubious Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, for U.S. intervention in Venezuela for regime change, even though such a violation of a nation’s sovereignty is illegal under international law.

If the American news media had any integrity and genuine independence for critical reporting, it would be holding the Trump administration to account for its criminal foreign policy. Why aren’t the media pouncing on the flagrant lies and absurdities, and condemning the outrageous acts of murder and aggression?

The U.S. media are performing their historic role of acting as a propaganda service to justify or obscure criminal aggression by Washington towards its Latin American neighbors. Not just Latin America but scores of other countries around the world have endured illegal invasions and subversions for regime change.

Since the end of WWII and the establishment of the UN Charter, the United States has systematically violated the Charter’s principles under the guise of numerous pretexts: from defending democracy against communism to protecting human rights, from eliminating weapons of mass destruction to promoting nation-building, and so on. The latest pretext is protecting Americans from “narco-terrorism”.

The truth is that the United States is a rogue state that has trashed and violated international law for the selfish hegemonic interests of its ruling class. This has been going on for 80 years to the point where international law and U.S. pretensions of democracy are in shambolic disrepute.

This truth is what the servile U.S. media has systematically covered up for the past eight decades by credulously propagating the pretexts for criminality. No matter how many nations have been destroyed by Washington’s regime-change interventions and wars, no matter how many millions have been killed and displaced, the American media dutifully cover up for the criminal aggression.

The complacency of the established U.S. media makes them complicit in the crimes of empire. This complicity is why the U.S. acts with impunity and relentless aggression against other nations.

If the U.S. media can’t call it out with such a brazen example as Venezuela, the conclusion is that such media are incapable of any truthful journalistic service. They are part of the problem.

Finian Cunningham is the co-author of a forthcoming book, Killing Democracy: Western Imperialism’s Legacy of Regime Change and Media Manipulation.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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After rejecting a plan that would see Ukraine concede territory to Russia its leadership has come under new pressure.

Trump’s 28-point Ukraine plan, leaked by former U.S. envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg, was an attempt to shut the war down – at least for now. The European dimwits, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Ukrainian ruler managed to sabotage it:

One camp, including Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and other officials, views Ukraine as the primary obstacle to peace and favors using U.S. leverage to force Kyiv to make major compromises, according to multiple current and former officials.

The other camp, represented by Rubio and other officials, sees Russia as the culprit for having launched an unprovoked invasion of its neighbor and says Moscow will relent only if it pays a price for its aggression through sanctions and other pressure.

With his deputies vying for his attention along with Republican lawmakers and European leaders, President Donald Trump has veered back and forth on how to resolve the conflict.

While the 28-point plan included several points Russia could not agree to (like a 600,000 strong Ukrainian army), it also included significant concession Ukraine would have to make. It could have been the base for further discussions with Russia. But Rubio allowed the Ukrainians to shrink the plan down to 19 points by taking out any Ukrainian concessions while adding erroneous demands (a 800,000 strong Ukrainian army) which are unacceptable to Russia.

Trump is, as usual, behaving like a weathervane unable or unwilling to force his will on the opponents of his plan.

The Ukrainian army is collapsing. Pokrovsk had been enveloped and occupied a week ago. But Zelenski and others kept claimed that the Ukrainian was winning that battle. As the army breaks down and its soldiers flee from their positions (in Russian) other cities, like Huleipole and Siversk, will soon fall too.

There is no way for Ukraine to win the war. The longer the war takes the more will be lost for Ukraine.

The utter delusion behind the rejection of Trump’s 28 point plan was demonstrated by the European High Representative for Foreign Affairs Katja Kallas:

“We still need to get from a situation where Russia pretends to negotiate to a situation where they need to negotiate”

Sure. And how are going to get there? After 19 rounds of EU sanction on Russia the 20th package will certainly take care of it?

During the latest round of negotiations the acting president of Ukraine Vladimir Zelenski had named the chief of his office Andrei Yermak and the Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council Rustem Umerov as negotiators.
This was widely seen as an attempt to protect both persons from prosecution for their involvement in a recent case of large scale corruption.

Yermak admitted as much when he called up Simon Shuster at The Atlantic to put an end to the current round of negotiations:

Volodymyr Zelensky, in the next phase of talks to end the war in Ukraine, intends to draw a red line at the most contentious issue on the table: the Russian demand for Ukraine’s sovereign territory. As long as he remains the nation’s president, Zelensky will not agree to give up land in exchange for peace, Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Andriy Yermak, told me today in an exclusive interview.

“Not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory,” said Yermak, who has served as Zelensky’s chief of staff, lead negotiator, and closest aide throughout the full-scale war with Russia.

“As long as Zelensky is president, no one should count on us giving up territory. He will not sign away territory,” he told me by telephone from Kyiv. “The constitution prohibits this. Nobody can do that unless they want to go against the Ukrainian constitution and the Ukrainian people.”

Russia will ignore such nonsense and take by force whatever territory it thinks it needs. Further down Yermak explains to Shuster why he was tasked with negotiations:

In our interview, Yermak responded at length for the first time to the investigation and the resulting calls for him to step aside. “The pressure is enormous,” he told me. “The case is fairly loud, and there needs to be an objective and independent investigation without political influence.”

By appointing him to lead Ukraine’s negotiating team despite the scandal, Zelensky made clear to the people of Ukraine that Yermak continues to enjoy his trust, he said. The people of Ukraine “see that I have been beside the president all these years during all the most difficult, tragic, and dangerous moments,” Yermak said. “He trusted me with these negotiations that will decide the fate of our country. And if people support the president, that should answer all their questions.”

Ukraine has now officially rejected the core element – land for peace – of Trump’s plan. The U.S. immediately responded to this open defiance. Today, by using its control over the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and various ‘nationalist’ and fascist media in Ukraine, it hit back at Yermak:

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) are conducting searches at the office of Andrii Yermak, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, in the government district on the morning of 28 November.

Source: Ukrainska Pravda journalist at the scene

Details: Ukrainska Pravda journalists managed to record around 10 employees from NABU and SAPO entering the government district.

The independent Ukrainian outlet Strana summarizes the political background of this action (machine translation):

Observers drew attention to the fact that the searches began just before the visit of US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, a representative of Donald Trump, to Kiev. According to a popular version, he should put pressure on the Ukrainian authorities to agree to concessions under the Trump peace plan, including with regard to the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Donbass.

And just yesterday, Yermak solemnly proclaimed that as long as Vladimir Zelensky is president, Ukraine will not make territorial concessions.

Therefore, many people in political circles associate the searches of Yermak’s apartment with these events. That is, according to this version, Washington, with the help of NABU, makes it clear to Zelensky that the situation is serious and it’s time to adjust the position on the peace plan.

According to another version, the searches are connected with the long-running line of the “anti-Green coalition” to deprive the president of real power and turn him into the “queen of England” by losing control of the parliamentary majority and the government. One of the central elements of this plan is the dismissal of Yermak, which Zelensky has so far refused to do. But now, apparently, they decided to present him with new arguments in favor of such a step.

I seriously doubt the second explanation though this is not a neither nor situation. NABU is unlikely to act on anything without having a green light from the U.S. ambassador in Kiev.

Zelenski and Yermak will certainly hit back at NABU. A few month ago they had already tried to neuter it but had to retreat under pressure from Washington and Europe. They can use security services under their control -Ukraine’s FBI equivalent SBU –  to arrest and indict NABU official.

The race is on.

Who will be the first to be arrested: Andrei Yermak or the chief investigators of NABU?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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The phrase “Woke Right” arrived almost overnight. Cultural critic James Lindsay helped popularize the term to describe a segment of the Right that he says imitates the tactics of the Woke Left. Yet it is quickly becoming a weapon used to silence anyone who questions Israeli or American foreign policy. Crisis Magazine editor Eric Sammons notes that those using it often act like “the woke police” themselves.

What Lindsay Gets Right

In his long conversation with Ami Kozak on Ami’s House, James Lindsay traces the history of “woke” as a mindset rather than a policy list. For him, “woke” is a way of seeing the world through a single lens of power and grievance. It falsely elevates politics to a pseudo-theology—that of a cosmic struggle between oppressors and oppressed. It is inspired by resentment, which inevitably fosters online mobs, practices cancel culture, and treats ideological opponents as heretics who must be hunted down rather than debated.

Lindsay argues that a similar pattern has emerged on parts of the Right. He points to Groypers and white identitarians who imitate the Left’s tactics through inverted identity politics and online transgression. The posture they call “based” often amounts, in his view, to boundary pushing for its own sake, a similar defiance that mirrors the Woke Left’s obsession with taboo-breaking.

Lindsay is not wrong. Some young men on the Right have slid from dark humor to outright hostility. They swarm critics online, demand ideological purity, and treat any challenge to their idols as betrayal. Such behavior is a real problem.

Lindsay’s analysis becomes especially valuable in his distinction between types of speech about Israel and Jews. He differentiates criticism of Israel as a state, criticism of individual Jews, debates about Zionism as a political project, and the far more serious phenomenon he calls true anti-Semitism, which he defines as the conspiracy theory that Jews secretly control world events. “Anti-Israel criticism,” he notes, is legitimate since “everybody should be critical of every state,” while “anti-Jew” refers to personal prejudice. Only the conspiratorial claim that “the Jews control everything,” as he puts it, belongs under the label anti-Semitism.

Still, Lindsay’s framework is not without its problems. He often speaks as though certain questions are suspicious by definition, as if asking about Israeli policy, lobbying networks, or foreign entanglements somehow puts a person on the road to Nazi thinking. That kind of reaction mistakes honest prudential concerns for something sinister that is simply not there. People ask hard questions for various reasons. When we treat every uncomfortable query as morally suspect, we only imitate the reaction of the Woke Left, which treats disagreement, albeit incoherently, as intolerance (tolerance already implies disagreement). Ironically, refusing to engage reasonable concerns is what drives some people toward true extremists who promise to discuss the forbidden subjects without fear.

Lindsay also warns that the term “anti-Semitism” is now used so broadly that it is losing its meaning. That, he argues, pushes legitimate questions into what he calls the “third rail” (a topic considered too dangerous or taboo to touch) of public discourse, a “verboten” zone where actual extremists recruit.

Lindsay discusses these points in more depth with Jordan Peterson, where they examined the psychological traits that animate both the Woke Left and its imitators on the Right. They noted that the problem is not ideological disagreement but a style of engagement rooted in resentment, purity spirals, and an inability to tolerate ambiguity. He stresses that ordinary conservative critics of foreign policy are not “Woke Right” but that the label applies to those who weaponize identity and engage in mob tactics.

Where the Label Becomes a Weapon

Once the term “Woke Right” circulated beyond Lindsay’s analysis, it quickly widened. In his interview with Kozak, Lindsay mentions a range of personalities, from Candace Owens to Andrew Tate to Groyper-adjacent influencers. Whatever one thinks of those personalities, the more troubling aspect is the fact that the term is now applied well beyond its intended scope.

Recent commentary has inflated the label even further. A Times of Israel piece titled “How the Woke Right Joined the Left’s War on Israel” treats nearly any conservative criticism of Israeli policy as evidence of ideological deviation. Seth Mandel’s essay in Commentary makes a similar move, casting mainstream foreign-policy skepticism as a form of resentful “wokeness.” These analyses misfire. They brush aside legitimate concerns about war, foreign aid, and American interests, and they cast every dissenting view as a symptom of ideological disorder.

There are indeed subcultures on the Right that play with identity politics and online provocation, but the term “Woke Right” is now being used as a catchall against those whose only offense is asking uncomfortable questions. Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Dave Smith have all been treated as suspect simply for interviewing controversial guests or refusing to accept pro-Israel orthodoxy without qualification. Such descriptors function more as a method of stifling debate than any diagnosis.

Free Speech for Me, Not for Thee

How can one possibly ignore this hypocrisy? Commentators who built careers defending free speech and warning about cancel culture now retreat to the very corporate outlets they once condemned when a rival challenges their taboos. Ben Shapiro spent years attacking CNN as propaganda, yet he ran to Jake Tapper to denounce Tucker Carlson for interviewing Nick Fuentes. Mark Levin and Florida politician Randy Fine likewise urge that critics of Israel be shunned as anti-Semites or traitors. This is not an argument but an attempt to use institutional power to punish dissent, the same practice conservatives once criticized on the Left.

Donald Trump reacted quite differently. Asked about Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, he answered that no one can dictate who Carlson may interview and that people can judge for themselves.

The instinctive defense of free speech stands in clear contrast to those who now reach for accusations as political weapons. If woke behavior involves policing speech, enlisting institutions to shut down opponents, and branding every form of dissent as bigotry, then it is hard to deny that some pro-Israel conservatives are mirroring the very Left they say they stand against, even as they accuse other factions on the Right of being complicit.

Read the Whole Article

The post Why the ‘Right’ Now Cancels Its Own appeared first on LewRockwell.

From the earliest days of America’s history, our forebears offered frequent and fervent prayers of thanksgiving to God. In our giant compilation of America’s great historical documents, called THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS, we include the very first Thanksgiving Proclamation rendered in this new land. The date was June 20, 1676. On this day, the governing council of Charlestown, Massachusetts, held a meeting to determine how best to express thanks for the blessings of Divine Providence that had seen their community securely established. By unanimous vote they instructed Edward Rawson, the clerk, to proclaim June 29 as a day of thanksgiving, America’s first. America’s first Thanksgiving Proclamation says in part (spelling in the original):

The Council has thought meet to appoint and set apart the 29th day of this instant June, as a day of Solemn Thanksgiving and praise to God for such his Goodness and Favour, many Particulars of which mercy might be Instanced, but we doubt not those who are sensible of God’s Afflictions, have been as diligent to espy him returning to us; and that the Lord may behold us as a People offering Praise and thereby glorifying Him; the Council doth commend it to the Respective Ministers, Elders and people of this Jurisdiction; Solemnly and seriously to keep the same Beseeching that being perswaded by the mercies of God we may all, even this whole people offer up our bodies and souls as a living and acceptable Service unto God by Jesus Christ.

I don’t think it was coincidental or circumstantial that one hundred years from this day (almost to the day) the Continental Congress received Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for a Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. (We have Richard Henry Lee’s Resolution for Independence in THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS as well.)

All told, we have 212 full-size (8½ x 11) pages containing 57 of the greatest documents of American history compiled under ONE title. We call this magnificent collection THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS. There isn’t another book like it in existence. This book is absolutely essential to the knowledge of American history.

THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS are being printed and distributed RIGHT NOW.

The first Thanksgiving Proclamation issued by the revolutionary Continental Congress was on November 1, 1777, and authored by Samuel Adams. It reads in part:

FORASMUCH as it is the indispensible duty of all men to adore the superintending providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with gratitude their obligation to Him for benefits received . . .

It is therefore recommended . . . to set apart THURSDAY the eighteenth day of December next, for SOLEMN THANKSGIVING AND PRAISE: That at one time and with one voice, the good people may express the grateful feeling of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their DIVINE BENEFACTOR: and that, together with their sincere acknowledgments and offerings, they may join the penitent confession of their sins, whereby they had forfeited every favor; and their humble and earnest supplications that it may please God through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance . . . . That it may please him . . . to prosper the means of religion, for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth “IN RIGHTEOUSNESS, PEACE AND JOY IN THE Holy Ghost.” {Quoting Romans 14:17}

Remember, Sam Adams penned this Thanksgiving Proclamation in the midst of the Revolutionary War, when the sufferings from war were at their worst—and when the outcome of the war was very much in doubt.

After our War for Independence had been successfully concluded and our Constitution and Bill of Rights had been adopted, a motion was made in Congress to initiate the proclamation of a National Day of Thanksgiving.

Mr. Elias Boudinot (who was the President of Congress during the American Revolution) said he could not think of letting the congressional session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining with one voice in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings He had poured down upon them. Mr. Roger Sherman (a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) justified the practice of thanksgiving on any signal event not only as a laudable one in itself but as warranted by a number of precedents in Holy Writ. This example he thought worthy of a Christian imitation on the present occasion, and he would agree with the gentleman who moved the resolution.

The following is taken from the Congressional Record (U.S. Senate), September 26, 1789 (the House version passed on September 25):

Resolved, That a joint committee of both Houses be appointed to wait on the President of the United States, to request that he would recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed, by acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a constitution of government for their safety and happiness.

Ordered, That Messrs. Boudinot, Sherman, and Sylvester be appointed of the said committee on the part of this House.

Resolved, That the Senate do concur in the above recited resolution, and that Messrs. Johnson and Izard be the committee on the part of the Senate.

This resolution was delivered to President George Washington, who readily agreed with its suggestion and put forth the following proclamation by his signature:

Thanksgiving Proclamation

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanks-giving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th. day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks, for His kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of His providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge and in general for all the great and various favors which He hath been pleased to confer upon us.

Given under my hand at the city of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789. George Washington

America’s Pilgrim and Patriot forebears led our country in offering continual prayers of thanksgiving to God. They genuinely believed that America’s independence, peace and prosperity were due to a divine work of providence from the hand of a merciful, benevolent Creator and Redeemer.

Tragically, the spirit of humility and thanksgiving that birthed this great country has all but vanished. When expressions of thanksgiving are extended, they are not rendered to a gracious Divine Providence but to self-aggrandizing politicians. And for the most part, politicians are not humble servants of the people but proud, arrogant, self-serving charlatans. They respect neither the Natural Laws of God nor the constitutions of the people who elected them. Even worse is the fact that many (if not most) professing Christians seem to prefer their politicians that way.

But only people who are filled with the spirit of humility and gratitude can expect the favor and blessing of Heaven. As one reads America’s history, he or she must be impressed with the spirit of humility and gratitude that commonly resided within the hearts of the great men and women who birthed and built this once-free nation.

Read the great documents contained in THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS, and one will easily see this spirit of thanksgiving resident in the hearts of America’s patriots—past and present:

From the Mayflower Compact to Patrick Henry’s Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech to the personal letters between John and Abigail Adams to the Virginia Bill of Rights to Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis to Ben Franklin’s Call to Prayer to America’s Declaration of Independence to George Washington’s Farewell Address to William Barret Travis’ Letter to The People of Texas at the Alamo to Grover Cleveland’s First Inaugural Address and to Ron Paul’s Farewell Address to Congress, one will read and sense the ubiquitous spirit of respect and reverence for and thanksgiving to Almighty God and the principles of Natural Law.

Once again, THE FREEDOM DOCUMENTS are available RIGHT NOW. Our supply will not last long. Now you can have the great documents of American history at your fingertips in one beautiful volume.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

The post The Thanksgiving Heritage of America appeared first on LewRockwell.

Did Lyndon B. Johnson have John F. Kennedy assassinated? Most political figures are killed by their successors. Only one man had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill JFK, and that is LBJ.

For further reading on LBJ check out these book (Affiliate Links)

LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination https://amzn.to/3JjbSqR

The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1) https://amzn.to/3rFvZtg

Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2) https://amzn.to/3rPGGKd

Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3) https://amzn.to/3svx46m

The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume IV) https://amzn.to/3JdtPXQ

The post America’s Untold Stories: Did LBJ Kill JFK? Part Two – The Cover-up 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 probabilmente 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.

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-societa-degli-algoritmi)

Ormai esternalizziamo la formazione della nostra realtà ad algoritmi progettati non per la verità, ma per il coinvolgimento. Questi sistemi non si limitano a riflettere i nostri pregiudizi: li amplificano, li distillano e ce li restituiscono in forme sempre più concentrate. I feed dei social media di individui politicamente opposti sono diventati così divergenti che potrebbero benissimo essere resoconti provenienti da pianeti diversi.

Come ho scritto nel pezzo, Per non cadere divisi, credo che questa frammentazione sia una caratteristica, non un difetto. La frammentazione della nostra realtà collettiva giova a coloro che preferirebbero che litigassimo tra di noi piuttosto che accorgerci di chi tira davvero i fili.

Il proprietario di una Tesla che ora contempla l'idea di rottamare la sua auto a causa delle posizioni politiche di Elon Musk rappresenta qualcosa di più profondo della fedeltà o del tradimento al marchio. Simboleggia quanto le nostre scelte di consumo si siano completamente fuse con le nostre politiche identitarie. Non ci limitiamo più ad acquistare prodotti; stipuliamo contratti morali con i marchi. Quando questi marchi “tradiscono” la nostra tribù politica, lo viviamo come un tradimento personale.

Come ha osservato Naomi Wolf, individui un tempo diversi ora ripetono a pappagallo identici temi di discussione con le stesse espressioni facciali, come se fossero posseduti da un copione collettivo. L'ordinamento algoritmico dell'umanità ha creato un mondo in cui persone un tempo uniche si trasformano in PNG prevedibili una volta stimolate da determinati argomenti.

Do you ever talk to liberal former friends and hear the same personality’s unpleasant replies, even though they once were all different pleasant personalities? Do you see that all these different people below have the exact same facial expression as if possessed by the same awful… https://t.co/WQUt3wgwhb

Questo fenomeno corre parallelo alla “Sindrome anti-trumpiana” emersa anni fa: una risposta emotiva così viscerale da trascendere la valutazione razionale. Lo schema si ripete perché il sistema necessita di questi parafulmini emotivi. Una popolazione concentrata sulle personalità ha meno possibilità di notare schemi strutturali.

Mentre discutiamo su quale miliardario sia il più virtuoso, o quale figura politica meriti la nostra eterna lealtà, i sistemi sottostanti che plasmano il nostro destino collettivo avanzano indisturbati. Non si tratta di una coincidenza, è un progetto.

Come Bill Hicks, il mio comico/filosofo preferito del XX secolo, e scomparso troppo presto, illustrò in modo brillante nel suo famoso sfogo sulla politica: un burattino condivide le nostre convinzioni, un altro burattino sembra più di nostro gradimento, ma c'è una sola persona che tira i fili di entrambi i burattini.

Come ho esplorato in un altro pezzo, La seconda Matrix, questo schema di reindirizzamento di preoccupazioni legittime verso canali controllati è coerente attraverso le generazioni. L'approccio incrementale alla trasformazione sociale ha profonde radici intellettuali. La Fabian Society, che prende il nome dal generale romano Fabio Massimo che sconfisse Annibale con pazienza strategica piuttosto che con il confronto diretto, sosteneva il cambiamento istituzionale graduale rispetto agli sconvolgimenti rivoluzionari. La loro finestra temporale per il cambiamento non era di anni, ma di generazioni.

Metodologie simili sono state articolate da varie figure influenti nel corso della storia. Come affermò Max Horkheimer della Scuola di Francoforte: “La Rivoluzione non avverrà con le armi, ma avverrà gradualmente, anno dopo anno, generazione dopo generazione. Ci infiltreremo gradualmente nelle loro istituzioni educative e nei loro uffici politici, trasformandoli lentamente in entità marxiste, mentre ci muoviamo verso l'egualitarismo universale”.

Klaus Schwab del World Economic Forum parlò apertamente di “penetrare nei gabinetti” dei governi con individui affiliati al WEF – un'affermazione che suona cospirativa, ma che è stata pronunciata come un risultato di cui essere orgogliosi.

Sky news Australia pic.twitter.com/2vRDLHV9C1

La genialità di questo approccio sta nella sua plausibile negabilità. Ogni singolo cambiamento appare ragionevole se preso in modo isolato. Solo se visto in modo olistico emerge il modello, ma chi ha la prospettiva per vederlo nel suo complesso? La nostra attenzione è deliberatamente frammentata, la nostra rabbia attentamente incanalata verso obiettivi approvati.

Nemici artificiali, alleati artificiali

I nostri ecosistemi informativi non si limitano a rafforzare le nostre convinzioni, ma creano i nostri nemici. Se siete filo-israeliani, vi vengono propinate le voci anti-israeliane più estreme. Se siete simpatizzanti dei palestinesi, vi vengono mostrate le prospettive filo-israeliane più spietate. L'algoritmo vi assicura di essere perennemente indignati dai peggiori rappresentanti di suddetti opposti.

Ad esempio, la mia comprensione più sincera va a chiunque sia nato con disforia di genere e si senta intrappolato nel corpo sbagliato. In qualche modo questa visione compassionevole si è evoluta in “gli uomini dovrebbero poter praticare sport femminili” – una versione caricaturale dell'empatia e completamente disallineata dalla realtà. Questa specifica controversia sugli atleti transgender negli sport femminili non faceva nemmeno parte del dibattito pubblico qualche anno fa, eppure in qualche modo dovremmo riorganizzare la società per accogliere questa posizione assurdamente estrema.

Sui social media lo stesso schema divisivo si ripete quotidianamente. Sfogliando lo stesso evento di cronaca da fonti diverse, si vedranno realtà completamente diverse: i conservatori hanno mostrato le voci progressiste più estreme, i progressisti hanno alimentato le reazioni conservatrici più infiammatorie. Durante le elezioni del 2020 questi feed divergenti hanno creato mondi informativi così separati che gli americani non sono riusciti nemmeno a mettersi d'accordo sui fatti fondamentali di quanto accaduto.

Allo stesso modo coloro che hanno perso la testa per Elon Musk o Donald Trump potrebbero benissimo avere ragione alla fine, anche se dubito che sarà per le ragioni che pensano. La loro preoccupazione dovrebbe essere la tecnocrazia, non la riduzione degli sprechi governativi o qualsiasi altra cosa li stia effettivamente facendo impazzire. Guardate come i media generalisti hanno creato la controversia sul “saluto nazista” attorno a Elon Musk, o l'incessante battaglia legale contro Trump: un'ulteriore prova di un'ingegneria della realtà progettata per provocare risposte emotive piuttosto che un'analisi ponderata. La gente non discute nemmeno se dovessimo averla una tecnocrazia: è a malapena presente nella coscienza pubblica, figuriamoci nel dibattito pubblico. Invece stanno discutendo se preferiscano una tecnocrazia di sinistra o di destra.

Le voci più estreme vengono amplificate perché generano coinvolgimento. Le posizioni ragionevoli vengono sepolte sotto priorità algoritmiche che premiano il conflitto rispetto al consenso.

Scambiamo quindi questi estremismi selezionati algoritmicamente per campioni rappresentativi. Arriviamo a credere che “l'altra parte” sia composta interamente dalle sue voci più irragionevoli. La possibilità di un terreno comune svanisce quando siamo convinti che i nostri avversari siano uniformemente malevoli o deliranti.

Trascendere la manipolazione

Come possiamo sfuggire a questa divisione artificiale? Iniziamo riconoscendo che il disprezzo è la moneta di scambio del controllo. Quando proviamo disprezzo per i nostri concittadini, stiamo partecipando alla nostra stessa privazione di potere.

L'atto più rivoluzionario potrebbe essere rifiutarsi di considerare i nostri vicini come nemici, anche quando forze potenti traggono profitto dal nostro reciproco antagonismo. Questo non significa abbandonare i principi, o fingere che i disaccordi non esistano; significa riconoscere che l'esagerazione di questi disaccordi serve interessi che nessuna delle due fazioni politiche sosterrebbe volentieri. Le persone ragionevoli dovrebbero essere in grado di intavolare conversazioni civili per discutere i mezzi e i metodi per migliorare il mondo che lasceremo in eredità ai nostri figli e nipoti.

Il sistema teme la solidarietà che trascende le tradizionali linee di divisione; teme le conversazioni che identificano preoccupazioni comuni nonostante i diversi quadri di riferimento; teme i cittadini che possono dissentire sulle linee di politica pur riconoscendo reciprocamente la loro umanità.

Le nostre tecnologie sociali sono progettate per impedire esattamente queste connessioni. Frammentano le discussioni, premiano l'indignazione e fanno sì che non si veda mai il contesto completo. Ci mantengono reattivi piuttosto che riflessivi.

Costruire una forma di resilienza alla realtà 

La strada da percorrere non è ignorare le differenze o fingere che le falsità siano ugualmente valide. È sviluppare resilienza alla realtà, la capacità di valutare le informazioni al di là del loro valore di segnalazione tribale.

Quando incontrate nuove informazioni, chiedetevi: questa affermazione serve principalmente a rafforzare le vostre convinzioni esistenti? Vi fa sentire moralmente superiori a un gruppo esterno? Semplifica fenomeni complessi in eroi e cattivi? Questi sono segnali d'allarme di manipolazione informativa, indipendentemente dall'allineamento politico.

Cercate fonti di informazione che occasionalmente mettano in discussione le vostre convinzioni. Non quelle che vi indignano solamente, ma quelle che vi fanno riflettere. La distinzione è cruciale. L'indignazione rafforza i percorsi neurali esistenti; una vera sfida ne crea di nuovi, invece.

Posso solo dire con umiltà che non ho idea di chi abbia veramente il controllo, ma so questo: ogni giorno che passa senza che si parli dei danni causati dall'industria farmaceutica e alimentare, più persone finiscono nel loro tritacarne. Chi di noi non si lascia coinvolgere dal tribalismo politico spesso pensa che entrambe le parti siano un po' folli. L'adorazione dell'eroe è ridicola, così come la sua demonizzazione. Dovremmo chiederci chi abbia il vero potere e il controllo, perché è abbastanza ovvio che non sono mai stati i politici: nella migliore delle ipotesi solo dirigenti di medio livello (middle management).

Soprattutto mantenete contatti diretti con le persone, al di là delle divisioni politiche. Gli algoritmi perdono potere quando si confrontano con la complessità umana. È più difficile demonizzare una filosofia politica quando tra i suoi sostenitori ci sono persone che rispettate e a cui tenete.

La mente integra

L'obiettivo finale non è l'uniformità politica, ma l'integrità mentale: la capacità di gestire la complessità senza ripiegare su narrazioni semplicistiche. Il panorama informativo frammentato ha creato menti frammentate, con un pensiero compartimentato che ci impedisce di vedere le contraddizioni nelle nostre visioni del mondo.

Le forze che traggono profitto dalla nostra divisione contano sulla nostra tendenza a persistere in schemi di pensiero consolidati. Gli individui più pericolosi per questo sistema sono quelli che non possono essere facilmente categorizzati, che mettono in discussione i propri presupposti con lo stesso vigore con cui mettono in discussione l'autorità, rifiutando il conforto della certezza tribale in favore di una ricerca perpetua.

In un mondo di divisioni artificiali, l'atto più rivoluzionario è l'integrità: dell'informazione, del pensiero e, in definitiva, dell'umanità.

Quando il disprezzo per chi si trova dall'altra parte della barricata irrompe dentro di voi, riflettete: chi trae profitto dalla vostra rabbia? Quale potere mantiene la sua presa mentre ci combattiamo a vicenda? Il nostro compito non è solo assistere allo spettacolo delle marionette, ma creare connessioni che lo trascendano. Questo è ciò che temono di più.

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

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

Sex Lives of the Presidents: from Washington to Clinton, by Nigel Cawthorne

It didn’t start with “Bubba” Clinton, or even Jack Kennedy. Ever since the Father of our Country was sworn in over 200 years ago, the White House has seen its share of oversexed, adulterous, philandering presidents. From Washington’s countless bed partners to Jefferson’s allegedly illegitimate children, Kennedy’s notorious womanizing to Clinton’s unstoppable libido, find out the surprising and sometimes bizarre sexual peccadillos and practices of all the men in the Oval Office.

Scanning this book is one of my guilty pleasures, discovering the torrid and lascivious high jinks and sexual shenanigans of the occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500.

Full of salacious anecdotes and ribald tales of the horny Commanders-In-Chief from Washington to Clinton, each one more hilarious a hoot than the previous.

One of my favorites is when Bill Clinton told his close aide, Arkansas state trooper Roger Perry, that Gennifer Flowers “could suck a tennis ball through a garden hose.”

The post Sex Lives of the Presidents: from Washington to Clinton appeared first on LewRockwell.

This  GRTV video production addresses the complexity and diversity of modern warfare. 

Digital control over a World population of more than 8 Billion People is an instrument of modern warfare, in liason with NATO and the Pentagon.

It’s the “smartphonization” of humanity which repeals fundamental human rights Worldwide. 

“Economic Warfare” is carried out in coordination with the conduct of military operations. Its objective is to destabilize national economies, resulting in unemployment,  poverty and despair. 

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post War Against Humanity appeared first on LewRockwell.

Twenty years ago, there was no greater villain to the left than Dick Cheney. The vice president was called a fascist. He was called a warmonger. He was called Hitler. He was the center and soul of left-wing derision and Democratic identity.

Their ire? The George W. Bush administration’s 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, for starters, considered today to be one of America’s greatest foreign policy mistakes. Even a majority of veterans believe it was not worth fighting. Then there was the torture, the rampant due process violations, and the fact that Cheney’s advocacy for extreme executive power made him an enemy of the Constitution.

Concerning Cheney and national depravity, there’s a lot to work with.

The progressive pundit Rachel Maddow was once all in on this left-wing hate. She built her early career on it.

Last week, Maddow attended Dick Cheney’s funeral.

Cheney never apologized for or even said he regretted Iraq. He was seemingly down to torture until the day he died.

Maddow was not at Cheney’s funeral to show grace to a once wayward man who had since repented. Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald noted of MSNBC’s biggest star, “Maddow’s career as a commentator began during Bush/Cheney, when she’d frequently compare Cheney to the worst monsters in history (I was on her programs when she said it).”

Greenwald added, “For so many liberals, Cheney is now rehabilitated despite regretting nothing: solely for opposing Trump.”

That’s it. Cheney was against Trump. In 2025, even for dead fascists, warmongers and Hitlers, that’s all it takes for the left to sing your praises.

If this sounds simplistically silly, it’s because it is.

Once Donald Trump finally replaced former villains Dick Cheney or George W. Bush as the Great Satan in leftist minds, there was virtually no self-awareness in Democrats’ drift into turning these neocon Republicans they once despised into heroes. Dubya gets the same love.

In their blind hatred for Trump, mainstream Democrats also ended up becoming something closer to 2003-era Republicans in their foreign policy. One X user commented on the service for Cheney, “Anyone that attended Cheney’s funeral is going to be upset with an end to war.”

Greenwald agreed, “Exactly: I bet if you were to survey the people in attendance at Dick Cheney’s funeral—from Rachel Maddow and Kamala Harris to Lindsey Graham and George W. Bush—opposition to ending the war in Ukraine would be close to 100%, if not unanimous.”

He has a point. After “Resistance” posters and Covid-era virtue signaling got stale for the left, pro-Ukrainian yard signs and social media flag icons became as popular with Democrats as they were with Lindsey Graham.

Democrats and neocon Republicans like Graham ended up with the same foreign policy. The former came to it as an emotional reaction to “America First” Trump. The latter just never changed, welcoming their reformed pro-war Democrats with open arms.

To be fair, mainstream Democrat attitudes toward Israel and Gaza have varied. On the United States’ proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, they have not.

Read the Whole Article

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“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle.

Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

Knowing who to trust and who to distrust at this point in history is the most important quality for anyone who expects to maneuver their lives and those of their loved ones through the final years of this Fourth Turning. I trust people who base their opinions on facts, not some government approved narrative regurgitated by legacy media bubble headed bimbos and “expert” talking heads. Michael Burry, Ed Dowd and Edward Snowden are men whose opinion I value.

They have all put their careers on the line telling the truth, when virtually everyone else was toeing the Deep State/Wall Street/Big Pharma line regarding the surveillance apparatus monitoring everything we say on our phones or type on our computers; the Federal Reserve/Wall Street manufactured housing bubble to replace the Dot.com bubble; the Covid plandemic created as an excuse to manufacture trillions of new debt because our empire of debt began seizing up in September 2019; and the current Everything Bubble (commercial real estate, residential housing, stocks, bonds, bitcoin, AI).

I’ve been a huge fan of Ed Dowd since reading his principled, factual, data driven destruction of the Covid narrative in real-time when the world had lost its mind and had bowed down to the authoritarian dictates of our government overlords. He was right all along about the Covid scheme to enrich Big Pharma, politicians, and legacy media, while seeing how far the ignorant masses could be pushed before they pushed back. Other than Ed and a small minority of other brave truth tellers, the globalist elite scheme worked to perfection, with billions injected with a toxic gene altering concoction, and the power of government enhanced and broadened.

The tweet below from Ed Dowd was from sixteen months ago, four months before the election of Donald Trump. Absolutely no one was speculating about the scenario Ed laid out. And now his “conspiratorial conjecture” is playing out in real time. No one with any brains wanted the dementia ridden basement dummy or the cackling brain dead hyena, and their cult party of death and destruction to continue their reign of terror on our nation.

Trump and his MAGA legions swept into power (or was he ushered into power?) with promises of America First, an economic renaissance, retribution for the criminal politicians in DC who conducted a coup against Trump, the instantaneous end of wars, MAHA, releasing the Epstein client list, and drastic reduction in government spending through Musk’s DOGE initiative. The level of hope and enthusiasm from Trump’s base, and even the moderates who voted against Kamala, was off the charts. NOT ANY MORE.

This needs to be said now and I will be attacked. I have no proof so it’s a literal conspiracy theory but bears watching with eagle eyes.

Conjecture: If I were in the shadows and had an agenda of ushering in a reset to control the end of the current ponzi debt based fiat system…

— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) July 23, 2024

The real owners as described by George Carlin and/or the invisible government as described by Edward Bernays, really don’t care which figurehead from the uni-party is installed at the top of this dung heap of debt. The fleecing of the national treasury continues unabated by the ruling class, and the plight of the plebs deteriorates on a daily basis. But they have been convinced by their overlords to continue going deeper into debt, while thinking they can vote their way out of this delusional debt debacle of a floundering empire.

Trump’s closure of the border and continuing modest efforts to deport the tens of millions of illegal invaders is about the only real positive I’ve witnessed in his first year in office. The old “at least he’s not Kamala” mantra is wearing thin and does not explain his exasperatingly stupid decisions and bloviating pronouncements on a daily basis. Those who adhere to the principles of liberty, freedom, transparency, free speech, not policing the world, and fiscal responsibility are extremely disappointed, but not surprised by the results under Trump thus far. His absolute vitriolic hatred for Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who voted with him 90% of the time, tells me all I need to know about Trump’s moral compass and adherence to the Constitution.

Despite the initial publicity campaign (propaganda) for DOGE and the huge cuts to spending which Trump spewed on a daily basis, the national debt increases by $6.5 billion PER DAY, just as it did under the pants shitting president before him. Future generations are incurring $3.3 billion PER DAY of interest on the now $39 trillion national debt. Trump’s tariff revenue is like pissing in an ocean of debt, as he acts like he is going to send us $2,000 checks with the money he just made us pay by imposing the tariffs. The big beautiful bill cut nothing. Ignoring future recessions and multiple looming wars, the CBO projects the debt to go up by another $23 trillion in the next ten years. I’ll take the over, if the entire Ponzi scheme doesn’t collapse beforehand.

The president who was going to end all the wars funded Israel’s mass genocide in Gaza and their attacks on Iran, while bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities with U.S. forces. Trump has continued to fund Ukraine’s futile war against Russia, while utilizing U.S. weaponry and personnel to conduct drone attacks within Russia. Trump and his NATO minions are conducting a proxy war against Putin, risking a WW3 and nuclear scenario. And now, under the guise of fighting the drug war, he is blowing up speedboats and planning to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela. I’m sure this is about illegal drugs and not the 300 billion barrels of oil sitting under Venezuela’s footprint.

It seems the government shutdown, which 95% of the country didn’t even notice because the government does absolutely nothing but shake us down for tax dollars to distribute to their cronies and enrich themselves, has allowed Trump and his bureaucrat minions to pretend they can’t calculate and announce the true figures regarding GDP, CPI, and employment. If the numbers were good, they would be shouting them from the roof of the White House. The fact they are refusing to report key economic data tells you all you need to know.

Now no Q3 GDP report?

The wheels must be coming off the “Golden Economy” bus. https://t.co/wb0GnYa15b

— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) November 25, 2025

I guess the fact government reported inflation in January 2025 when Trump took over was 3.0% (real figures of 5% to 10%) and it continues to run at 3.0% today doesn’t actually support Trump’s narrative of lower prices. And the average person, who shops for groceries, pays their monthly electric and gas bill, buys clothes, pays rent or a mortgage, and lives in the real world, knows they are being screwed while the ruling class reaps the windfall of inflated stock prices and want even more.

Trump threatening Powell to reduce interest rates isn’t to help you. It’s to help his real constituents on Wall Street, in corporate executive suites, and globalist billionaires who pull his puppet strings. Senior citizens who depend on interest income will be screwed coming and going, as their income will decline and the rise in inflation will make their living expenses rise further. I can’t understand why consumer confidence continues to fall and delinquencies on car loans, credit cards, student loans, and mortgages hit multi-year highs every month.

If Trump ever had any conservative principles, he has completely abandoned them. His totalitarian tendencies show themselves more each day, as he picks winners and losers within the economy, threatening to deport the Intel CEO one day and then investing $9 billion of your tax dollars in that company a week later. He is now all in on the AI scam, throwing billions of your tax dollars at these scam artists at Nvidia, Palantir, Oracle and the rest of the lying Silicon Valley scum, bilking investors and ultimately the tax payers out of their hard earned money. If this entire AI narrative is nothing but hot air and fraudulent promises, and it accounts for half of the country’s GDP growth, we will relive the Too Big To Fail 2008 bailout when it all blows up in the not too distant future.

If AI doesn’t work, it will risk recession, blowing out fiscal deficits into insufficient foreign UST demand.

If AI works, it will undermine the U.S. fiscal position (~half of US Federal receipts come from employment), blowing out deficits into insufficient foreign UST demand. https://t.co/z9koZiptU3

— Luke Gromen (@LukeGromen) November 24, 2025

Catherine Austin Fitts has been warning about the coming digital gulag for years. We now have a state sanctioned bubble in AI, with the billionaire club cheering it on, knowing they will be bailed out again when it all goes to shit, like bubbles always do. The fact Trump is encouraging this and adding fuel to the fire reveals this is all part of the ultimate plan to enslave us under the guise of saving the world once again. First it was the great financial crisis (2008/2009), then it was Covid (2020-2022), and now for the coup de grace with the implosion of the everything bubble and rollout of CBDCs, digital surveillance, social credit scores, and living under the thumb of a global authoritarian aristocracy.

Pulling the plug on massive subsidy invested in the digital gulag and shifting resources to investing in our young people is the pathway forward. https://t.co/l3Se9zw6NN

— The Solari Report | Catherine Austin Fitts (@solari_the) November 24, 2025

The globalists attempting to enact their WEF sanctioned Great Reset agenda see China as the template for enslaving the populations of the Western world. They are already monitoring the vast majority of all your communications, as Edward Snowden revealed over a decade ago. The noose tightens around our necks, as Trump and his acolytes enact measures to further reduce our liberty, freedom and rights. This is all building towards a final showdown. One day within the next few years the powers that be will pull the final block out of this jenga tower of unsustainable debt and it will all come crashing down. They will rush to assure you they can fix this if you just trust them once again and agree to their conditions of survival.

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S CHILLING WARNING IS NOW UNFOLDING IN REAL TIME

What China built… is exactly what Western governments are quietly preparing for.

Snowden is crystal clear:

Every photo, every purchase, every message, every movement — all of it is being fed into algorithms pic.twitter.com/X8RGFsRfY1

— karma (@karma44921039) November 23, 2025

I think I’ve connected the dots, and they paint a dire picture of the future, unless we refuse to comply with their plans. Will you and I have the courage to resist and fight their diabolical enslavement plans? Fourth Turnings always come down to a final battle between good and evil, with clear winners and losers. If they win, we become slaves in their digital gulag for eternity. If, against all odds, the liberty minded, freedom loving citizens of the world can somehow defeat these billionaire psychopaths in suits, along with their armies of feckless bureaucrats and politicians, future generations will have the opportunity to blaze a new path forward. I’m not a guy who hangs my hat on a hope narrative, but I am willing to fight for a better future for my children and their children. I hope you join me in this fight.

Reprinted with permission from The Burning Platform.

The post Connecting the Dots….Reveals a Dire Picture appeared first on LewRockwell.