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Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

The Guardian

 

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See here.  

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A Technician wrote:

These Christian-Zionist nutcases are referring to Genesis 12.

And I will make of you (Abram) a great nation, and I will bless you (Abram) and make your name (Abram) great, so that you (Abram) will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you (Abram), and him who dishonors you (Abram) I will curse, and in you (Abram) all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Now note here. ..

And in you (Abram) all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Genesis 17.

I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.” Then Abram fell on his face. And God said to him, “Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.

Note again…

And in you (Abram) all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Genesis 22…

And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”

“By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”

Galatians 3

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.

Hebrews 10

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’”

Did you know that the covenant between God and Abraham were unconditional?

The covenant to the Jews were conditional.

Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.“

And how shall all the nations be blessed?

And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

And in you (Abram) all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.

Faith…

Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.

But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Nowhere does it say that you must bless Israel to be saved.

So I ask you, who are Gods people?

 

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Ricordo a tutti i lettori che su Amazon potete acquistare il mio nuovo libro, “Il Grande Default”: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0DJK1J4K9 

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato "fuori controllo" negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

di Jeffrey Tucker

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/psicofarmaci-e-beni-veblen)

Al liceo nel West Texas alla fine degli anni '70, gli psicofarmaci erano considerati beni Veblen, ovvero prodotti desiderati come indicatori di status. Venivano consumati in modo vistoso dai figli dei benestanti, profondamente consapevoli che i loro compagni di scuola non potevano permettersi né il trattamento, né la presunta cura.

Così i ragazzi – ne conoscevo molti e ogni tanto mi tolleravano nelle loro cerchie – si vantavano della loro diagnosi, delle loro prescrizioni, del mix di farmaci e di come li faceva sentire.

Portavano le loro pillole e le ostentavano, snocciolando i nomi di questo o quel farmaco e ridendo maliziosamente di tutto. Non c'era nulla di particolarmente sdolcinato, se non la loro performance. Erano sinceramente orgogliosi, come si potrebbe essere quando si indossa un cappotto o delle scarpe di lusso e costosi. Le pillole erano solo una parte del mix: ostentavano anche le loro presunte malattie come medaglie d'onore.

C'era sempre un'aria di distacco nella cultura di questi ragazzi, un disprezzo noncurante per tutti i sistemi, che fossero la scuola, la famiglia, la chiesa, persino la società in generale. Si sentivano al di sopra di tutto, e i farmaci e la condizione che stavano affrontando ne facevano parte. Era praticamente un segno distintivo. C'era persino un accenno di politica, un'evidenziazione e un'esibizione di alienazione. Erano allo stesso tempo il vertice della gerarchia sociale, ma lo disprezzavano.

La maggior parte di questi ragazzi eccelleva nei voti e puntava in alto nelle domande di ammissione all'università, senza alcun dubbio sul successo. Ci riuscivano nonostante la loro grave condizione mentale, che attribuivano ai genitori, alle strutture sociali, agli insegnanti, ai protocolli e alla macchina sociale in generale. La società li aveva resi malati, ma i farmaci davano loro la libertà di fluttuare al di sopra di tutto.

Da allora non ho più seguito le loro vite. Forse li hanno abbandonati dopo l'università e hanno vissuto normalmente. Forse no. Probabilmente nessuno scriverà un memoir, quindi non lo sapremo mai. In ogni caso nei decenni successivi questo bene Veblen ha seguito la stessa strada di tutti gli acquisti di lusso: è diventato mainstream. Gli psicofarmaci sono ormai comuni tra adulti e bambini. È un'industria enorme: come i cellulari e le TV generazioni fa, hanno attraversato la struttura sociale anno dopo anno.

Ora arriva Unshrunk di Laura Delano, un libro che potrebbe cambiare tutto. Se non fosse un'autobiografia, renderebbe popolare la grande narrativa gotica dell'epoca vittoriana. Anche se eliminasse ogni commento sul merito di tutte queste presunte malattie e cure, sarebbe comunque un dramma fantastico dall'inizio alla fine.

Niente di ciò che dico può prepararvi all'avventura che questo libro porta con sé. È perfettamente strutturato in modo quasi poetico per trasmettere al lettore la sensazione reale di attraversare ogni fase di un decennio e mezzo di cocktail di farmaci, istituti psichiatrici, ospedali e molto altro, fino alla sua auto-motivata emancipazione dall'intera industria.

Temo che l'argomento da solo scoraggi i lettori. Non dovrebbe, però. Leggetelo come fareste con una grande opera di narrativa. Rende ancora più avvincente rendersi conto che si tratta di un'opera autentica – una persona vera – con tutto il dolore che ogni autore dovrebbe provare nel riversare su carta stampata la propria anima in questo modo. È un'esperienza rara, unica nel suo genere ai nostri tempi.

Inoltre anche se estrapolaste tutte le critiche mediche dettagliate su sperimentazioni farmacologiche, effetti collaterali, equivoci di mercato da questi farmaci e le trasformaste in una monografia a sé stante, avrebbe un valore enorme.

Quindi abbiamo davvero tre libri in uno: un brillante dramma con un arco narrativo fantastico, un'autobiografia di una giovane donna in un mondo a parte che la maggior parte di noi non conoscerà mai e un trattato medico tecnico su un intero settore.

Incombe nella narrazione la questione della classe sociale. L'autrice è nata in un mondo sconosciuto ai più, quello di Greenwich, Connecticut, discendente di un presidente in carica per tre mandati, laureata in una scuola preparatoria e destinata ad Harvard, beneficiaria di ogni privilegio finanziario e sociale, a cui è stata offerta la migliore assistenza psichiatrica disponibile al mondo.

Non è stata maltrattata. È stata curata, lo dice lei stessa:

Una volta ero malata di mente e ora non lo sono più, e non è stato perché mi è stata fatta una diagnosi sbagliata. Non sono stata curata in modo improprio o eccessivo. Non sono guarita miracolosamente da presunte malattie cerebrali che alcuni dei migliori psichiatri del Paese mi avevano detto che avrei avuto per il resto della mia vita. In realtà ho ricevuto una diagnosi corretta e sono stata curata secondo gli standard di cura dell'American Psychiatric Association. Il motivo per cui non sono più malata di mente è che ho deciso di mettere in discussione le idee su me stessa che avevo dato per vere e scartare ciò che ho scoperto essere in realtà finzione.

La migliore assistenza, i migliori medici, le migliori istituzioni, le migliori consulenze, i migliori farmaci costantemente perfezionati dagli esperti: un po' più di questo, un po' meno di quello ed eccone una nuova. Quando la diagnosi di Laura passò da bipolare a borderline, fu affidata alle cure del padre stesso della presunta malattia: il dott. John G. Gunderson del McLean Hospital di Harvard (che aveva visitato anche Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton e Susanna Kaysen).

Aveva tutte le ragioni per fidarsi degli esperti, tranne una: non migliorava mai, peggiorava solamente. Con il tempo, concluse gradualmente che il suo vero problema era iatrogeno, ovvero causato proprio dagli stessi farmaci che si diceva fossero la soluzione.

Asking Psychiatrists Q: How many patients have you cured? pic.twitter.com/S4ix6DXflK

— Camus (@newstart_2024) June 22, 2025

I primi accenni di vera guarigione colpiscono il lettore quando Laura iniziò a frequentare gli Alcolisti Anonimi, dove tutti applaudivano quando i presenti rivelavano da quanto tempo erano sobri. Leggendo mi ha colpito il fatto, sebbene l'autrice non lo dica, che praticamente tutti capiscono che l'alcolismo è un problema enorme e che la via più sicura per tutti è la sobrietà. Nessun medico raccomanda di bere di più, più alcolici, diversi tipi di alcolici, più cocktail, come soluzione a qualsiasi problema.

Ciononostante per i cocktail farmaceutici più potenti si applica uno standard completamente diverso. Vengono somministrati a milioni di pazienti, con l'avvertenza di non saltarli mai; questo è ciò che fanno solo quei pazienti cattivi.

Le persone che tentano imprudentemente di farne a meno vengono ridiagnosticate con la “sindrome da sospensione” – come se l'eliminazione delle tossine creasse una nuova malattia – il che, naturalmente, richiede nuove prescrizioni.

L'intero sistema è costruito per far sì che le persone continuino a prendere farmaci. E quando si cerca di eliminarli, il corpo assuefatto reagisce con sintomi che sembrano rafforzare la diagnosi e la soluzione... speriamo che capiate perché vi abbiamo prescritto questi farmaci!

Perché questo giudizio capovolto contro una tossina (l'alcol) e a favore di tutte le altre? Ecco il nocciolo del vero scandalo: riguarda l'enorme potere dell'industria, il misticismo della scienza, il prestigio del mondo accademico e le associazioni di classe legate alle diagnosi di alto rango e alle presunte soluzioni.

Questa linea di pensiero apre a ulteriori critiche all'intero sistema medico e, più in generale, ai prodotti farmaceutici. Questo libro sgretola la comprensione popolare della malattia mentale e la capacità della classe degli esperti di affrontarla. Le lezioni sono così sconvolgenti che nessun lettore guarderà i prodotti farmaceutici standardizzati allo stesso modo.

Nel periodo del Covid, ricorderete, anche il rispetto dei protocolli era un fattore determinante. Solo le persone di cattivo gusto reclamavano la propria libertà, osavano girare per i negozi senza mascherina, o non rispettavano il distanziamento sociale negli ascensori. I tipi trasandati protestavano contro i lockdown. Camionisti canadesi, certo! Cos'altro c'è da sapere? Le brave persone, i professionisti di successo e ben pagati che usavano il computer portatile, restavano a casa, guardavano film in streaming e si tenevano lontani dagli altri.

Ricordo di essere stato sgridato mentre camminavo all'aperto senza mascherina.

“Le mascherine sono socialmente raccomandate”, urlò un uomo, storpiando alcune parole. C'era furia nella sua voce perché qualcuno di così miserabile come me osava trovarsi nel suo quartiere, senza dubbio diffondendo il Covid. Mi ero snaturato rifiutandomi di coprirmi il viso, come se mi fossi rivelato un vettore di diffusione della malattia.

Il panorama morale è diventato cristallino con la distribuzione dei vaccini. Le persone pulite li facevano, le persone sporche li rifiutavano. Il modello era estremamente primitivo, ma con un pregiudizio di classe che sfociava in una sorta di bigottismo regionale: automaticamente gli stati con un'alta percentuale di persone non vaccinate votava per Trump. Intere città sono diventate segregate, come culmine di una prospettiva di classe che ci ha separato da loro (si veda la mia teoria del pulito contro lo sporco come lente attraverso cui comprendere l'intero periodo).

Non avevo mai avuto molta consapevolezza della classe sociale e del suo significato in politica prima di quel periodo. Improvvisamente era tutto ciò che contava, con le agenzie governative che delineavano chi era essenziale e chi no. Né m'era venuto in mente che protocolli e prodotti medici erano emersi come un bene Veblen, qualcosa da consumare con orgoglio nella propria posizione elevata negli strati sociali, come l'arte moderna e la filosofia postmoderna.

È stato geniale da parte dell'industria della medicina psichiatrica promuoversi – a partire da molto tempo fa – come un bene di lusso, un indicatore di classe, un prodotto destinato al consumo dei privilegiati. C'è qualcosa che non va in ogni vita. Le persone di successo lo risolvono con le pillole. Prendete le vostre medicine: non siete un tossicodipendente, ma un paziente altamente responsabile che può permettersi le migliori cure. Come dice la canzone, il diavolo indossava un camice.

Il libro di Laura Delano intreccia questi elementi in un racconto allarmante di tragedia seguito da un'ultima speranza. Dal primo capitolo in cui iniziano i presunti problemi, passando per gli alti e bassi e le storie di 21 farmaci diversi, non vedevo l'ora di vedere come l'autrice avrebbe gestito il finale.

Gli ultimi capitoli sono perfetti in modi che non rivelerò per paura di fare spoiler. La mia ulteriore speranza è che questa breve recensione ispiri molte altre persone a percorrere lo stesso cammino dell'autrice e a trarne insegnamenti profondi.

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

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Allow me a moment to preface what I want to say with a disclaimer. That is, I hate politics. Oh, I know I’ve written about politics in the past, talking about the actions of one politician or another and how that might affect you and I; but I certainly didn’t do that out of any love for politics or the political process. I’ve spent all my life voting against candidates, more than voting for them, because I really haven’t seen all that many candidates who truly embodied my beliefs. So, I find myself voting against the one who is furthest from where I stand, by voting for the other one. What a crazy way to run a railroad.

This is not to say that I am against democracy, even though we’re not one (we’re a constitutional republic, which is not the same thing). Nor am I against our country. We’re still the greatest country on the face of the earth, despite our flaws. We didn’t become greatest by eliminating our flaws, but because our flaws pale in comparison to other countries, both past and present. We’re far from perfect, but at least we’re working on it.

Nonetheless, even though I hate politics, I see the need for it. One has to look no further than the many examples of countries where governments have fallen, to see the need for politics. Even with all it gets wrong, it is the political process that allows us to live together under a set of laws that have been created with the intent of treating all people equally.

As I look at the political landscape today, I can’t help but think that if there’s anything that will tear this country apart, it’s politics. We find ourselves living in a time where the political divide (which has always existed) is deeper and wider than ever before. Most people, on both sides, live in an echo chamber, only listening to voices which parrot their own political thoughts. The idea that I grew up with, that both sides sit down at the table and find a middle ground which works for everyone, is long gone.

We are probably headed towards another civil war and it will be just as ugly as the last one was. That one was over political issues as well (slavery was a political issue in those days). The big difference is that the lines between the two sides won’t be as clean cut as they were before. That will likely lead to many non-combatants falling victim to the battle. But the biggest casualty will be our nation itself.

What happens when that system collapses?

There have been a fair number of examples of political and economic collapse that we can find in history. Almost universally, the lack of a solid political system has led to anarchy, with warlords rising up to take control. Those warlords strive to gain territory, fighting between themselves for supremacy. Through that, it is the innocent people in the population who suffer.

It’s kind of funny that our news media even tries to make some of these warlords look good. They are no better off than a barbarian chieftain who invades and conquers. The occasional acts of mercy they might display are carefully crafted to make them look good, often with some personal benefit to the warlord at the same time. They are takers, even more so than our current crop of politicians.

There are many of us who look all but look forward with anticipation to a societal collapse. We want a release from the oppressive burden of our political overlords and want to put our survival knowledge to work, living as we’ve always dreamed; self-sufficient masters of our own fate.

Sadly, that’s a false image. While we would have to put our survival skills to use and be self-sufficient, we wouldn’t be living in an ideal world. That is, unless you happen to have the keys to the lost valley of Shanga La. Rather, we would find ourselves living in the midst of gang warfare, with constant battles all around. If any of the warring factions even suspected that we had a stockpile of supplies, they would attack us, over and over again, until they killed us. I know you probably think you can survive that; think again… there are more of them, than there are of us.

So, what’s the answer?

The more I’ve studied this out, the more I’ve realized that part of our survival strategy has to be the restoration of local government; the quicker, the better. I’m not sure yet what to do about higher levels of government and I’m not really all that sure that we can do anything; but if we want to live in any semblance of peace, we’re going to have to do something at the local level.

That means someone stepping up to take the place of leading the people, while talking about the need to reestablish the local government. If you and I don’t do that, someone will; and we might not be all that happy about who that someone is. They might be those very same warlords that I’m talking about avoiding and they might be socialist politicians, who are going to come after us, just because we have resources they need to redistribute, in order to make themselves look good. Either way, it won’t be good for us if they get into power.

That leaves us with two viable options. The first is to take power ourselves and the second is to get behind someone we can trust, helping them to take power. The problem with supporting someone else, of course, is that we don’t really know how much we can trust them. Even our best friend could turn against us, wanting to redistribute our stockpile in order to garner political favor, as soon as they realize they don’t need us anymore.

Start in Your Neighborhood

The first place to start any rebuilding of the government is right there where you are. I’ve written before about working together with neighbors in a time of crisis. Being the one who brings order to your neighborhood and ensures your neighbors’ survival will naturally put you in a position of leadership within your neighborhood. As word gets out and more people join your neighborhood survival team, that leadership will naturally spread to include a broader area.

This won’t be hard to accomplish, as most people will be looking for some sort of leadership to rise up and tell them what to do. Your challenge in this case will be to make people realize that any help you offer comes with a price tag. That is, they’re going to have to work for the betterment of the survival group, doing their part to help make sure that everyone survives, even if that work is something that they consider to be beneath them.

Considering today’s entitlement society, this may be harder than it sounds. There will likely be plenty of people around, who are expecting the government to take care of them. These people may look at you as the government, even before there is any government in place, and thing that they are entitled to whatever help you can give them. the easy solution to that problem, is to just kick them out of the group. When they come back, and they likely will, they need to sign on the dotted line, indicating they understand that they need to work in order to receive anything.

Read the Whole Article

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The US Senate worked through the weekend on the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The goal was to pass it quickly to ensure the House will then pass it and send it to President Trump’s desk before the July 4th holiday.

However, disagreements among Republican Senators over reductions in spending on programs including Medicaid and food stamps as well as language in the bill eliminating “clean energy” tax credits were preventing Senate Republican leadership from getting enough votes to pass the bill.

Also, some Republicans disagree with other Republicans in both the House and Senate on increasing the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. Many conservatives see this income tax deduction as encouraging states to maintain high taxes to fund big governments.

One item in the BBB that few Republicans are objecting to is the bill’s increase in military spending. The House version of the BBB added 150 billion dollars to the Pentagon’s already bloated budget. The Senate bill gave the military-industrial complex 156 billion dollars.

Increasing military spending contradicts President Trump’s promise to stop wasting money on endless wars that have nothing to do with ensuring the security of the American people.

Some of the BBB’s military spending will be used to put troops on the border. I support strengthening border security. However, I do not support using the military for domestic law enforcement, which includes enforcing immigration laws. Soldiers are trained to view people as potential enemies, not as innocent civilians to be protected. Introducing this mindset into domestic law enforcement will lead to abuses of liberty.

Increasing spending on militarism while cutting spending on programs that help low-income Americans is bad politics and bad policy. Polls show that the majority of Americans, including many Republicans, do not support overseas intervention.

The growing opposition to our hyper-interventionist foreign policy is easy to understand. The US has engaged in numerous military actions in many countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria since the beginning of the 21st century. The American people pay for this militarism in several ways. One is the “inflation tax” imposed by the Federal Reserve in order to monetize the debt incurred by the US government for endless wars. President Trump has turned his back on his antiwar supporters by bombing Iran and by increasing military spending to over a trillion dollars.

The Republican insistence on increasing military spending is the main reason Congress cannot cut taxes without increasing the debt, making cuts in domestic welfare programs, or both. If the Republicans want to be the Make America Great Again party, they need to embrace a true America First foreign policy. This means no more regime change wars or US taxpayer supported “color revolutions.” Instead, America should return to the Founders’ vision of a country that, in the words of John Quincy Adams, does not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy” and instead is “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” while “the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

A return to a noninterventionist foreign policy is the only way we will be able to begin to pay down the national debt and restore a government that adheres to the constitutional limits on its powers and respects all the people’s rights all the time.

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The unforgiving war will be long and bloody. Yet the Angel of History seems to have caught a second wind.

It’s one of the most mesmerizing passages in the history of knowledge. In the 9th of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin – Jewish, tragic figure, solitary genius – dissects Paul Klee’s haunting painting Angelus Novus and graphically explains to posterity the drama facing the Angel of History:

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events: he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm propels him into a future to which his back is turned – whilst the pile of debris before him goes even higher. This storm is what has been called progress.”

The time has come to go beyond what may be read as a very apocalyptic Christian parallel between divinity and violent retribution. As Alastair Crooke detailed in his astonishingly perceptive 2010 book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, it was the need to restrain the furies of “divinely inspired” violence that led Hobbes to conceptualize Leviathan, where he called for a social contract between the individual and a necessarily strong, implacable government.

Moreover, it was the Hobbesian version of a social contract that laid the basis for John Locke to assert a dubious “natural goodness” of humanity, complete with a – very private – “pursuit of happiness” and the general welfare gleefully coalescing via the work of an invisible hand.

This fallacy/fairy tale shaped Western thought for over the next 300 years.

Now it’s a completely different ball game. We have been prisoners of Hobbes and Locke for too long: such a seductive pole dancing of legitimacy around which the Western-conceived nation-states grouped to protect and legitimize themselves and their plunder of the rest of the world.

Lately, the contemporary specter of “divine violence” was marketed to everyone from Africa to Asia as armed Islamist resistance. But now this mask has also fallen. The “new” Syria shows to everyone how al-Qaeda R Us – and always was.

Shelter from the – ultimate – storm

The time has also come to re-evaluate the plight of the Angel of History. No, he is not transfixed by “divine” rage; that’s actually quite man-made. Meanwhile, what continues to propel him forward – even as he casts his eyes to the past (“the backward half-look, over the shoulder, toward the primitive terror”, in T. S. Eliot’s striking image) is the wind of secular, Darwinian, tech “progress” – a single, unified catastrophe much more that a chain of historical events.

Yes, he continues to contemplate the tragedy; he badly wants to awaken humanity to the extent of the disaster; but the rush of now tech “progress”, AI-tinged, inevitably sweeps him away.

The Global South now seems to have a crystal clear perspective of the new contours of the catastrophe laid at the feet of the Angel of History.

The top two contemporary agents of the catastrophe have been fully identified: a psycho-pathological, genocidal death cult composed by elements of a self-appointed chosen tribe; and the post-historical elites of a dwindling empire. A deadly embrace – if there ever was one.

Yet now they have met an immovable symbol of Resistance. And they had to back off. To the astonishment of the Angel of History himself.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei laid it all out in a few sentences:

“The key point I wish to emphasize in my speech is that in one of his remarks, the President of the United States declared that Iran must surrender. Surrender! The issue isn’t about enrichment or the nuclear industry anymore. It’s about Iran surrendering.”

This is the voice of an ancient civilization-state – in contrast to post-modern, out of control barbarism: “Our cultural and civilizational wealth is hundred times greater than that of the US and other similar countries (…) The Iranian nation is noble and will remain noble.”

An irrational, and certainly not “divine” storm now aims to totally paralyze the Angel of History – imprinting on the narrative their revamped but equally tawdry notion of “end of History”, applied to the circumscribed space of West Asia.

And that brings us to how the Resistance will have to delve deep into the nitty-gritty, as in the practicalities of deterrence and defense, so the Angel of History may reinvent himself.

Cut to the Yemeni Armed Forces – this bastion of rectitude, a military organization guided by spiritual power: “The US and Zionist entity’s ceasefire agreement with Iran highlights that military force is the only language they understand.”

Add to it the number one lesson from the 12-day war: whoever controls the skies eventually will control the lands.

Iran’s leadership, as the fulcrum of Resistance, has some serious decisions to make. The most important, on the “language” issue as framed by the Houthis, is to trust Russia to help it set up a comprehensive, multi-layered offense/defense system, complete with hardware, combat and control centers, long-range radar stations, electronic warfare equipment, and badass jet fighters.

As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made it quite clear ahead of the meeting one week ago between President Putin and Iranian FM Abbas Araghchi:” It all depends on what Iran needs right now.”

They need serious backup. The Majlis – Iran’s Parliament – delayed for over a month the ratification of the comprehensive strategic partnership signed with Russia after the Duma approved it in late May. That includes weapons sales, military inter-connection and deep intel exchange – even if it does not imply a full military alliance.

Previous Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi clearly saw The Big Picture. He went full “Look East” – as in Eurasia integration. The current, meek Pezeshkian presidency attempted a “Look West” – naively trusting that the Empire of Chaos would actually practice diplomacy. They were in for a rude awakening.

The unforgiving war will be long and bloody. This is just the beginning – current pause included. Yet the Angel of History seems to have caught a second wind. Looks like his warnings about the catastrophe were finally understood by the overwhelming majority of the Global South. As we sift through the accumulated debris, Resistance is at hand – sheltering us from the ultimate storm.

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

The post The Angel of History as a Symbol of Resistance appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of the key themes I’ve tried to illustrate throughout this publication is that chronic illness has vastly increased over the last 150 years. Furthermore, again and again, doctors of each generation who observed each successive wave of that increase noticed that the treatments they learned at the start of their careers were much less effective for treating the patients they saw at the conclusion of their careers.

For example, here recent article, I discussed this collective loss of vitality in more detail, and listed what I believed were the primary culprits (which has been quite a challenge as there are now so many unhealthy things in our environment). In addition to listing the key culprits many are familiar with (e.g., the vaccination program has had a horrific impact on our health), I proposed another primary cause of chronic illness was modern life being highly disruptive to the natural rhythms the body depends upon for self-regulation and self-repair.

I believe this concept is relatively under appreciated within Modern Medicine (Allopathy) because, unlike almost any other medical system in history, our scientific approach to understanding the body does not recognize the concept of an innate “health” of the body, and as such, many Allopathic treatments are based around doing what they can to stabilize (e.g., in the ICU) or alter the body (e.g., through a surgery) and then hoping the body eventually works things out from there. In contrast, most other medical systems focus on what can be done to augment this innate capacity for recovery (health) and trust that through doing so, the present issue will resolve itself.

Note: typically the Allopathic approach (forcing the body to assume the state deemed necessary for the patient) is ideal to utilize for acute conditions, whereas the health-augmenting approach is what gets the best results for chronic conditions (something Allopathic medicine is well-known for struggling with).

At this point, I believe there are three reasons why we utilize the Allopathic model (discussed further here) rather than the health-focused model:

• The Allopathic model lends itself to creating a large number of perpetual treatments and diagnostic services for each person. Because this is so lucrative, it inevitably incentivizes its proponents to monopolize the entire medical market and healthcare practitioners to prioritize creating and utilizing its therapies.

• One of the fundamental psychological neuroses that exists in our culture is the need to control things and believe one knows exactly what’s happening. Because of this, our culture tends to default towards adopting methods and models that dominate nature rather than working in harmony with it and refusing to accept the inherent uncertainty that trusting in the path nature takes entails. Trusting in the health of the body to cure illness hence is opposed to the cultural philosophy Allopathy emerged from.

• Knowing if a therapy actually “works” is quite challenging, especially if the change can only be observed over a long time. Because of this, most medical research is based on whether an overt change can be consistently observed within a patient (e.g., lowering their blood pressure) and hoping that change will yield a long-term benefit rather than evaluating the long-term prognosis of people who receive a medical intervention. Because of this, medical research is strongly biased towards evaluating treatments that create an overt change (e.g., pharmaceutical drugs) rather than ones that augment the body’s health and lead toward a gradual recovery. Likewise, it is much easier to diagnose someone by their symptoms (and prescribe drugs to treat those symptoms) than it is to identify the root cause of their disease.

Self Regulating Cycles

The “health” of the body is highly dependent on the normal functioning of a variety of repeating cycles that occur within it.

For example:

• Practicing slow, smooth, and expansive nasal breathing has a profound impact on one’s health and longevity because breathing regulates many different critical physiologic functions.

• Normal exposure to sunlight serves a variety of critical functions for health, and once it is lost, one’s risk of dying doubles, and a variety of other conditions, such as depression set in (discussed further here).

• People need regular physical activity, whereas once they become sedentary, a variety of significant health issues arise. In turn, we have all noticed individuals who make a point to walk daily have dramatically improved longevity.

• The mind is designed to alternate between periods of rest and activity. Yet, in our modern era, we have to think constantly, which often occurs in conjunction with significant stressors.

• Humans are meant to alternate between periods of eating and not eating (fasting) rather than continually eating.

In short, many of the natural rhythms our bodies rely upon for self-regulation are heavily disrupted in modern society, which in turn results in a variety of consistent derangements to normal physiology that are now seen throughout the population.

Note: based on how much we frequently see people’s health improve once they restore their natural rhythms, I now believe their disruption is a primary cause of the widespread health dysfunction we see now.

The Importance of Sleep

Throughout my career, I’ve met countless integrative practitioners who believed that one of the most important things to do when treating a chronic illness is to normalize their patient’s sleep, as this cyclical process is one of the foundational methods the body uses to restore its health. Unfortunately, patients with chronic illnesses tend to have highly disrupted sleep cycles which are often very challenging to correct (e.g., insomnia is fairly common following a COVID-19 vaccine injury).

The important thing to understand about sleep is that it is a tightly regulated cycle which is both highly responsive to signals from the environment and also responsible for maintaining many of the other critical rhythms within the body.

During sleep, the body cycles through different phases of sleep, each of which performs a critical function (e.g., deep NREM sleep heals the brain and allows toxins to drain out of it through the glymphatics, while REM sleep consolidates memories and allows one to process the emotions of their experiences). A typical sleep cycle goes as follows:

Note: since REM sleep predominates later at night, not sleeping long enough disproportionately disrupts REM sleep.

Matthew Walker is one of the world’s most vocal sleep researchers. In his book Why We Sleep, he argues that some of the most important functions of sleep include:

• Maintaining circulatory health and preventing heart attacks.
• Ensuring proper metabolic health (e.g., sleep deprivation causes hunger, diabetes, and weight gain).
• Ensuring proper immune function (e.g., you are more likely to get the flu if you are sleep deprived).
• Preventing cancer.
• Preventing fatigue and brain fog (which are typically the most overt symptoms we notice from sleep deprivation).
• Remaining awake and alert.
• Healing and restoring the brain (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease is strongly linked to poor sleep).
• Regulating hormonal function and maintaining fertility (e.g., sleep deprivation lowers testosterone levels).
• Processing emotional trauma (e.g., sleep is typically disrupted in PTSD, and PTSD often significantly improves once a drug is given which prevents PTSD from disrupting sleep).
• Integrating one’s sense of reality and accurately interpreting emotional signals from one’s environment.
• Sleep allows the rational mind (the prefrontal cortex) to control counterproductive impulses (e.g., emotional outbursts, or binge eating).
• Maintaining one’s mental health (e.g., it’s well known that a variety of psychiatric conditions, such as bipolar episodes are triggered by periods of sleep deprivation).
• Maintaining one’s sense of reality (e.g., prolonged sleep deprivation can trigger psychosis, and sleep is known to be disturbed in schizophrenic patients).
• Facilitating creativity (e.g., many paradigm-shifting discoveries came from dreams, Thomas Edison was well-known for using dreams to concoct his inventions, and when people are woken up from REM sleep, they often demonstrate a radically improved abstract problem solving capacity).
• Reducing one’s sensitivity to pain (whereas sleep deprivation increases it).
• Facilitating the long-term retention of memories.

I generally agree with this list (and will cite more studies supporting it later in the article). Likewise, I am sure many of know firsthand how bad you feel when you are sleep deprived. Here are some of my personal experiences with sleep:

•I am fairly sensitive to the baselines within my body and I immediately notice that things within me go awry if I’ve had insufficient sleep. For example, I notice impairments in a variety of neurologic functions (e.g., I become significantly less able to tolerate the cold, my coordination worsens, and it’s much harder for me to maintain my focus in either an intellectual or social task).

•During periods of significant sleep deprivation, I will notice I have fleeting pain within the heart muscle and periodic arrhythmias. This is corroborated by a study that found one night of modest sleep reduction (as little as one or two hours) quickly increased one’s heart rate and blood pressure.

•During periods of insufficient sleep, I experience general mental fogginess that persists until I get a good night’s sleep (and sometimes two).

•I have repeatedly observed that one’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury is highly dependent upon whether they get significant sleep after the incident, something I in part attribute to improved venous and lymphatic drainage (e.g., most glymphatic drainage occurs during NREM sleep and when you are lying down, there is much greater venous drainage than while standing). Likewise, research shows that a significant part of the gradual recovery from strokes occurs while sleeping.

•Before high school, I accidentally figured out how to use sleep to facilitate the long-term retention of information. This “lifehack” allowed me to memorize large volumes of information in very little time, and was the main reason I was able to get through the academic system while simultaneously teaching myself a separate curriculum (e.g., I spent more time studying things I was not assigned to learn during medical school than the material I was expected to learn). I mention this because the rules I discovered through experimenting with my “lifehack” matched what Walker’s own data demonstrated (although some of them also went beyond the scope of what Walker looked at).

Note: NREM sleep is responsible for eliminating unnecessary memories, whereas REM sleep processes the day’s experiences and reinforces them into long-term memory.

•I tend to gain weight during periods of poor sleep.

Finally, Walker cites many examples of severe consequences occurring after prolonged periods of significant sleep deprivation (e.g., death or psychosis). I have also seen similar things occur. For instance, periodically I will have a patient who comes to me after engaging in an unsafe spiritual practice which involved staying awake for multiple days, after which they developed a permanent psychiatric or spiritual disorder (discussed further here).

Quantifying the Importance of Sleep

Any individual, no matter what age, will exhibit physical ailments, mental health instability, reduced alertness, and impaired memory if their sleep is chronically disrupted.

Even when controlling for factors such as body mass index, gender, race, history of smoking, frequency of exercise, and medications, the lower an older individual’s sleep efficiency score, the higher their mortality risk, the worse their physical health, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, the less energy they report, and the lower their cognitive function, typified by forgetfulness.

Immunity

During periods of sleep deprivation, immune system function significantly decreases. Some of the consequences of this include:

Cancer—Numerous studies have found an association between sleep deprivation and cancer (while conversely, others have not—which I believe is due to the difficulty of properly studying this topic). Data supporting the link includes:

•In 2010, using all the available evidence, the WHO classified shift work (one of the most reliable ways to heavily disrupt natural sleep cycles and something many workers in the healthcare field experience) as a probable human carcinogen. This link is also supported by a 2023 review paper.

• An English study of 10,036 people over 50 found that poor sleep resulted in a 33-62% increased risk of cancer.

• A study of 23,620 Europeans found that those who slept for less than 6 hours per day were 43-46% more likely to develop cancer.

• When mice were intentionally sleep deprived, they experienced their speed and size of cancer growth roughly doubled, relative to the well-rested group.

• When healthy young men slept for four hours, compared to nights where they slept eight hours, there was a 72% decrease in their circulating natural killer cells (which are responsible for eliminating cancers).

• Two different studies found sleep apnea (which disrupts healthy sleep) caused a large increase in one’s risk of dying from cancer.

• Existing data shows that sleeping pills (which disrupt normal sleep) are associated with a large increase in one’s risk of cancer.

Note: the increased cancer risk from poor sleep may also be due to disturbances in the body’s normal release of melatonin or insufficient tissue oxygenation.

Infections—individuals who are sick are more likely to develop infections (e.g., most times I get sick are after periods of prolonged poor sleep). Some of the evidence to substantiate this common observation includes:

• Rats that are not allowed to sleep deteriorate and eventually die. When death occurs, it is typically due to sepsis from their gut bacteria.
Note: humans also can develop blood infections from their gut bacteria, but it typically requires circumstances that predispose them to it (e.g., on a central venous catheter as that provides a site bacteria in the blood stream can adhere to, or following a bowel rupture).

• A study determined how much sleep research subjects had had in the last week and then exposed them to the common cold virus (by squirting it in their nose). It found those who had averaged less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.94 times more likely to develop a cold than those who had more than 8 hours. It also found those with poor sleep efficiency (how much of the time bed you are asleep) were 5.50 times more likely to develop a cold than those with good sleep efficiency.

A study of 56,953 nurses found women who slept 5 hours or less were 1.7 times as likely to develop pneumonia over a 4-year period compared to those who slept 8 hours a night.

• A 2002 study compared 14 healthy young men who slept for 7.5-8.5 hours a day to 11 others who restricted their sleep to 4 hours a night for 6 days, after which all 25 received a flu shot. The sleep-deprived group was observed to produce less than half the vaccine antibodies seen in the control group, and this loss continued after normal sleep had been restored

Note: this association has also been seen with other influenza vaccines along with hepatitis A and B vaccines.

• When patients take sleeping medications that interfere with the sleep cycle, they have a significantly increased rate of infections (e.g., one large study found they increased one’s risk of pneumonia by 54% and one’s risk of dying from pneumonia by 32%).

Read the Whole Article

The post The FDA’s Disastrous War Against Sleep appeared first on LewRockwell.

After years of opposing them, but facing constituents increasingly angry about rising electricity prices, New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently gave grudging support for two new Williams Companies natural gas pipelines.

Assuming they clear new hurdles, the Constitution Pipeline will transport gas 100+ miles from northeastern Pennsylvania fracking fields toward Albany. The 23-mile Northeast Supply Enhancement Pipeline will connect New York to the New Jersey segment of the Transco Pipeline, America’s largest-volume natural gas pipeline system, and carry enough gas to heat 2.3 million homes.

Hochul, other state Democrats and environmental activists have long stymied the projects, using exaggerated and fabricated water quality and climate change arguments – and fanciful expectations that heavily subsidized solar panels and onshore and offshore wind turbines can provide enough affordable electricity, enough of the time, to meet steadily increasing New York City and State power demands.

In exchange, the Trump Administration will let them continue installing gigantic offshore wind turbines that will generate 9,000 MW of electricity (less than one-third of what the state needs on hot summer days) perhaps 30-40% of the year … and be supported by fire-prone grid-scale batteries that would provide statewide backup power for about 45 minutes.

New gas turbines would help avoid blackouts, ensure that poor families freeze less often in winter and swelter less in summer, and help the state meet power needs that are soaring because of data centers, artificial intelligence, and legislatively mandated conversions from gasoline and gas to electric vehicles, stoves, and home and water heating.

They could also help reduce the need to import electricity from Canada and other states: some 36,000 gigawatt-hours (11% of statewide electricity) annually.

But legislators want to put another hurdle in the way. New legislation would force homes and businesses to pay $10,000 or more to connect to natural gas lines. If Gov. Hochul signs the bill, or the legislature overrides a veto, few or no new customers would take advantage of the new gas.

It’s a kill switch, reflecting the state’s determination to impose “climate leadership” and “protect communities” from alleged dangers from fossil fuels.

It’s also hypocritical and irresponsible. New York doesn’t just import electricity; it also exports garbage.

New York City generates nearly eight million tons of waste annually. Its last municipal incinerator closed in 1990; its last municipal landfill in 2001. City trash is now mostly sent on barges, trucks and trains to landfills (80%) and incinerators (20%) in New Jersey, Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia, Ohio and South Carolina! NY State exports 30% of its garbage.

The city and state could address both garbage and electricity challenges by using natural gas to power waste-to-energy (WTE) generating plants that burn trash, thereby reducing the need to landfill or export garbage, while increasing recycling, producing reliable, affordable, much-needed electricity, and reducing blackout risks that are climbing every year.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, a WTE or resource recovery facility operated by Reworld Waste burns home, business, industrial and other garbage that doesn’t go straight into recycling programs and would typically be landfilled, including myriad extraneous plastics. The trash is dumped in a receiving area, sorted for unacceptable materials like rocks, mixed thoroughly, and burned with natural gas in a chamber at 2000 degrees F for up to two hours, until it’s totally combusted to ash.

The heat converts water to steam, which is super-heated in tubes to drive turbines that generate electricity: 80 megawatts 24/7, enough for about 52,000 homes. Depending on its composition, a ton of waste generates 550-700 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Since opening in 1990, the plant’s trash has replaced the equivalent of burning 2,000,000 barrels of oil for electricity every year.

Glass from lightbulbs and other nonrecyclable sources becomes part of the ash stream, from which ferrous and nonferrous metals are recovered. Most of the remaining ash is used as a substitute for sand and aggregates in road and building construction, cement and cinder block production, and manufacturing other building materials.

Unsold ash is landfilled but, by the time the metals are removed, only about 10% of the original trash bulk and 25% of its original weight is left.

Even staples, paper clips, bottle caps, metal light bulb bases, aluminum foil, and wires from spiral notebooks and furnace filters can be “recycled” this way. In fact, enough iron, steel, aluminum, copper and other metals are recovered from the resultant ash at the Fairfax facility to build 20,000 automobiles annually.

However, plastic-metal-glass waste (computers, monitors, keyboards, printers, microwaves), broken pots and pans, household appliances and other larger refuse should go to special “white goods” and metal recycling centers.

Lime neutralizes acids in the airstream, activated carbon controls heavy metals, and fabric filter bags remove particulates, keeping air emissions below EPA standards. The scrubber waste (fly ash) is then dewatered and chemically stabilized, before being landfilled or used in construction materials.

Process steam condenses back into water and is reused. Water from the wastes and scrubbers is recovered, treated and used to cool the facility and equipment.

Two other trash-to-energy facilities serve the Washington, DC area; 75 across the USA generate over 2,500 MW of electricity. However, more WTE plants could help solve garbage, energy, landfill and pollution problems in metropolitan areas across the country (and worldwide), including:

* Philadelphia, PA – 1,300,000 tons per year of municipal solid waste (MSW), but only one WTE;

* Chicago, IL – 3,100,000 tpy, but just one WTE plant (other proposed facilities were rejected);

* Houston, TX – 4,200,000 tpy, with one WTE facility;

* Phoenix, AZ – 1,000,000 tpy, and one WTE facility;

* Los Angeles, CA – 4,000,000 tpy, but again only one WTE facility.

New York and other jurisdictions that have rejected natural gas and waste-to-energy/resource-recovery facilities are missing enormous opportunities to address challenges that will only become worse. They’re also dumping their own local responsibilities into their neighbors’ backyards.

These facilities ensure secure, affordable electricity generation close by, without the need for expensive backup power and multi-hundred-mile transmission lines to part-time wind and solar power.

They utilize fuels that America still has in abundance: gas and trash. And they reduce the need for resources that are in increasingly short supply: landfill space, cropland and wildlife habitats impacted, and bird, bat and other wildlife lost due to wind, solar and transmission installations.

From my perch, these clear and significant benefits clearly offset the cost and subsidy concerns that some have raised about WTE facilities.

Metro areas and states should apply pragmatism, reality and these benefits when reconsidering climate and “renewable” energy ideologies that have dominated public policies for far too long.

The post Burning Trash for Energy, People and Planet appeared first on LewRockwell.

What apparently riles the credentialed political Left — the “gay / race communists” in the apt new phrase — more than anything, is that most of the country has opted to not be insane. This follows a decade-long attempt to drive the country insane, of course, to believe in things that are patently untrue and absurd, and to utilize falsehood and absurdity to garishly destroy the nation.

So, it fits that Donald Trump, the uber-realist of political game-playing, pushes what remains of the Democratic Party into a rapture of impotent rage. They’ve got nothing left but the empty acting-out of lunatics in an asylum of their own making. The wrathful grass-widows choking on their chardonnay in Martha’s Vineyard, the furious nose-rings steaming under their keffiyehs in the summer heat, the “Transtifas” storming police lines with their ridiculous umbrellas, the doddering Boomer-hippies reenacting the festive protest marches of 1968, minus a single coherent principle, the wigged-out congresspersons storming the ICE detention centers, the Covid vaccine victims duped into multiple organ failure (their hearts and brains especially), the “allies” of every loser group from Bangor to Brentwood in a frenzy of baffled grievance — these poor, lost wretches so far gone that even the likes of David Axelrod, James Carville, and Frank Luntz can’t stand to be associated with them anymore, is all the Democrats have left in their manure-stuffed donkey stable.

The abiding mystery remains: what exactly set in motion this fantastic cascade of political madness, especially among the highly educated demographic. The seemingly obvious answer is higher education itself, infested since the 1960s with Marxist zealots, sexual malcontents, and resentment-filled diversity hires. And while that has surely played its part, it doesn’t sufficiently explain the ugly dynamic.

Another explanation runs toward a plot by international “oligarchical” corruptniks to corner all the goodies of the world and either turn the rest of us into their slaves, or just kill us off — and to do it in such a way as to rub it in our faces, so as to provide the corruptniks with some mirthful entertainment as they go about their dastardly business. For instance, the recent weekend wedding of Huma Abedin and Alex Soros on the very day that the moiling minions whom they sponsor held their nationwide “No Kings” rallies inn the streets.

Huma, the bride, you recall, was Hillary Clinton’s sidekick back in Hillary’s glory days, especially the time of her glorious and inevitable rise (her regal “turn”) to occupy the White House, thwarted inconceivably by the preposterous showman, Mr. Trump. Hillary, you also might recall, left the White House broke-ass-broke in 2001 only to agglomerate a stupendous multi-hundred-million-dollar fortune working as a US Senator and then Secretary of State (salaries $170,000 and $260,600 respectively). That is, Hillary acquired her great fortune in about the same way that the royalty-of-old acquired theirs — by grift and theft.

And Huma, former wife of disgraced congressman and convicted Internet pervert Anthony Weiner, is now wed to decade-younger financial royalist Alex Soros, son of George, who made the bulk of his fortune (estimated $7.2-billion) shorting the British pound sterling in 1992 and went on to found a vast array of NGOs and so-called philanthropies (the Open Society Foundations) that specialize in influencing elections worldwide, conducting regime-change campaigns, and lately financing seditious movements within the United States. Heir-apparent Alex is reported to have taken over the day-to-day operations of that network — but, we must have no kings, you understand.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has actually tried, against all odds and endless threats, to represent the interests of common US citizens, that is, most of us, the non-royal, and to navigate the collective consciousness of this human mass away from the long-creeping, imposed insanity. He was blind-sided and sandbagged by enemies in his naïve first term. But Trump has returned — after an astonishing exhibition of spiteful incompetence by his adversaries — much-chastened by previous failure and injury with a far-better crew, much better-prepared with a program for redeeming a spavined economy, reinstating common sense in the daily life of the nation (i.e., resistance to absurd propositions), and reform of a dangerous rogue bureaucracy.

The remnant Left is reeling now, most recently from last week’s SCOTUS decision foreclosing the universal injunction nonsense sponsored by Norm Eisen and Mary McCord’s lawfare corps. That campaign, which raged for five months, might prove to be their last gasp. You know, though, that they are plotting another round of election fraud for the 2026 midterms. But it looks like their previous frauds are on the verge of being uncovered — finally, after years of evasion and no help from a treasonous news media — and there’s a fair chance that they can’t pull off more fraud next time. Passage of a proof-of-citizenship law for national elections could seal that deal.

But first, the massive hurdle of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Whatever its virtues and defects, it must be gotten over for this larger effort of a journey back to civilizational sanity to continue. Hazards lurk at every turn. The awesome national debt hangs ominously over the whole enterprise and might sink it yet. Certain players in Europe steer deeper into their own insanity and look more and more like true enemies of the USA — far more than Russia does now — and then there is China: powerful, still rising, plotting cunningly. Plenty of travail awaits, but we’ll be better able to get through it with our minds right and our aim true. Aim to stay sane.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Stay Sane appeared first on LewRockwell.

A lot of the misunderstanding U.S. policy makers have of foreign countries is caused by the lousy reporting in U.S. media.

Here is just one of many examples:

After War With Israel and U.S., Iran Rests on a Knife Edge (archived) – NY Times, Jun 29 2025
The Islamic Republic limps on after the 12-day conflict. Where will the nation go from here?

The piece was filled by Roger Cohen – the ‘Paris Bureau chief for The Times’ – from Dubai.

The opener is somewhat weird:

Roxana Saberi felt like she was back behind bars in Tehran. As she watched Israel’s bombing of Evin prison, the notorious detention facility at the core of Iran’s political repression, she shuddered at memories of solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, fabricated espionage charges and a sham trial during her 100-day incarceration in 2009.

Like many Iranians in the diaspora and at home, Ms. Saberi wavered, torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country’s immense potential and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a cease-fire vied with each other.

That ‘longings’ language would fit the opener for some soft-porn essay. But it has nothing to do with the question the piece is supposed to (but does not) answer.

Roxana Saberi is U.S. born to an Iranian mother and a Japanese father. She lives with her parents in North Dakota. Only six out of her 48 years were spent in Iran where she worked until 2009 as a reporter for various western propaganda outlets. After she had been found in possession of secret documents she was jailed and later kicked out of country.

How can she be expected to tell us where Iran will go from here? She can’t.

Neither can any of the other persons quoted in the too long piece:

… said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London think tank.

And who is that?

At Chatham House, Sanam directs a diverse portfolio of research and policy initiatives, addressing critical issues such as Gulf Arab security and economic transitions, Iran’s regional ambitions, governance and political reform, women’s empowerment, and the intersection of climate and socio-economic challenges.

Another source of the NY Times:

… said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates. “A weak Islamic Republic could hang on four or five years.”

Looking at Abdulkhaleq Abdulla vita I wonder how he is prominent ‘in the UAE’:

Dr. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla is a Senior Fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is a United Arab Emirates national, …

Professor Abdulla was a Fulbright Scholar, a Visiting Professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics. He holds PhD in political science from Georgetown University and master’s degree from American University.

I see a lot of U.S. academia merits but not much Gulf experience in there.

Another of the NY Times ‘experts’:

… said Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington

Feltman is a former U.S. diplomat who has spent years in Tel Aviv but none in Iran. The Brookings Institute where he resides is the publisher of the Which Path To Persia pamphlet which is the still current manual for regime change in Tehran.

And last but not least one at least somewhat local ‘expert’:

“The people of Iran are fed up with being pariahs, and some were more saddened by the cease-fire than the war itself,” said Dherar Belhoul al-Falasi, a former member of the United Arab Emirates’ Federal National Council

‘Saddened by the cease-fire’? Falesi would know that how? He was quoted in Zionist media when he rejected to give UAE money to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority because ‘are corrupt’. Sure. How could they not be. But what does he know of Iranians?

There you have it. A New York Times piece which diagnoses Iran to be on a ‘knife edge’ based on five ‘experts’ none of whom is in Iran or has recently (if ever) been there. But all of them are from the very same swamp of U.S. foreign policy academics or ‘think tanks’ that live off and digest such pieces.

It feels like an outside look on some mysterious object with random guesses of what may be inside.

It is just a remix of the very same opinions that have been blubbered for years.

How is any policy maker supposed to get some understanding of Iran from it?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post NYT – Guessing About Iran With ‘Experts’ Who Lack Knowledge of It appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Vatican is set to publish a new Mass text called the Mass “for the care of creation.”

In a press note issued June 30, the Holy See Press Office announced details of a press conference on Thursday which will be the launch pad for a new Mass.

“There will be a press conference to present the new form of the Mass ‘pro custodia creationis,’ which will be added to the Masses ‘pro variis necessitatibus vel ad diversa’ of the Roman Missal,” the note read.

The Mass is believed to be joining the list of votive Masses in the Roman Missal.

Presenting the new Mass text will be two notable Vatican officials from the relevant dicasteries:

• Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., prefect of the Dicastery for Service of Integral Human Development.
• Archbishop Vittorio Viola, OFM, secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship.

At the moment, it is not yet known how long the Mass has been in preparation, though it is highly likely to have originated under the pontificate of Pope Francis.

It will be of key significance to examine the text upon its release, given another high-profile liturgical case that is currently underway – namely the three-year “experimental phase” of the Amazon rite, which seeks to draw from local Amazonian customs.

Alongside this is the pagan-linked, inculturated Mayan rite, which the Vatican is currently considering for the “indigenous” inculturation of people in Mexico.

Where the Mayan and Amazon “rite” differ to the expected Mass “for the care of creation” is that the former have been posited as inculturated rites, while the latter is understood to be more akin to a votive Mass.

Francis made the “care of creation” a prominent theme throughout his pontificate, dedicating numerous speeches and addresses to it.

His 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si’ became the reference text for a number of Vatican and papal initiatives focused on the so-called “green” agenda. In it, Francis spoke about a “true ecological approach” which listens to “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” The document later gave rise to the Laudato Si’ Movement, which aims to “turn Pope Francis’ encyclical letter Laudato Si’ into action for climate and ecological justice,” as the mass divestment from “fossil fuels” finds inspiration in the late pontiff’s environmental writings.

In October 2023, Francis published a second part to Laudato Si’ in the form of an apostolic exhortation named Laudate Deum.

The late pope also made numerous calls to action for global leaders to implement the pro-abortion Paris Climate Agreement, citing the “negative effects of climate change” and an “ecological debt” which required “climate finance, decarbonization in the economic system and in people’s lives.”

Cardinal Czerny’s Dicastery for Service of Integral Human Development is the Roman office charged with the practical implications of Pope Francis’ ecological concerns, along with his focus on the topic of migrants.

Recently, the dicastery recalled the 10th anniversary of of Laudato Si’, calling it “a unique opportunity to relaunch the commitment to our common home, a mission in which we are all called to actively participate.”

Archbishop Viola of the Dicastery for Divine Worship is better known for his opposition to the traditional Mass – a campaign which has been in full swing with increased pace in recent years, following Pope Francis’ Traditionis Custodes. Expanding even on those restrictions, Viola was believed to be writing a new document last summer which would have seen Pope Francis attempt to implement a new sweeping ban on the traditional Mass. That document never emerged; it is believed the text made it to Francis’ desk but that he never signed it.

As LifeSiteNews’ Jeanne Smits documented, Viola is a known admirer of one of the main architects of the Novus Ordo in 1969: Archbishop Annibale Bugnigni. Viola has chosen to wear Bugnini’s episcopal ring.

No official meeting between Pope Leo XIV and Viola has been recorded in the Pope’s public diary. One meeting has been documented between Leo and Viola’s superior, Cardinal Arthur Roche, which took place on June 3.

Czerny has been received on two official occasions, although it is quite possible that Pope Leo met with Czerny and Viola privately to discuss the new Mass text.

The text will be released on Thursday morning.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Vatican Announces New Votive Mass ‘for the Care of Creation’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Do something every day to help undermine public perception of the empire.

Draw attention to its abuses in places like Gaza.

Get people laughing at its absurdities and hypocrisies.

Spread distrust in the imperial propaganda services known as the western press by spotlighting their deceptions and manipulations.

Help people to recognize all the ways their government is screwing them over for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

Facilitate the collective dawning of the realization that everything westerners have been taught about their society and their world is a lie.

Help people to understand that it really, truly does not need to be this way.

Use every means at your disposal to help open up the next pair of eyelids to the ugly reality of the empire.

Cultivate a habit of daily acts of sabotage against the imperial machine. There is always something you can do.

You cannot defeat the machine by yourself, but you can do something every day to help tilt our society’s collective consciousness toward tearing it down together.

❖

Everyone keep pushing. It’s working. https://t.co/4Enf7GejNl

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 29, 2025

❖

I still can’t get over how we’re being asked to pretend “Death, death to the IDF” is some kind of hate crime at the exact same time IDF soldiers are telling the Israeli press they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians at aid sites.

I’ve been seeing a number of people arguing that it’s wrong to say “death to the IDF” because soldiers aren’t to be blamed for the criminality of their government. This framing is only accepted in the west because western soldiers also do evil things that our society needs to make up excuses for.

As an aside, “Death, death to the IDF” is an insanely catchy earworm. Been dancing around in my mind all day.

❖

Deliberately starving a civilian population and then setting up aid sites as a death trap to massacre starving people trying to get food is too evil to wrap your mind around. If we saw a supervillain doing this in a movie we’d think it was dumb, because it wouldn’t be believable.

❖

It’s like everyone’s standing around watching a man beat a small child to death at a restaurant.

“Should we do something?” someone asks.

“You saw the kid throw food at the guy,” someone replies. “The man has a right to defend himself.”

“But he’s killing him!”

“It’s a fight. Bad things happen in a fight.”

“Yeah, the boy shouldn’t have started a fight he can’t win.”

“You’re actually being quite hateful right now.”

And sure, maybe it’s true the child did set the man off by throwing food at him.

Maybe the child did so fully knowing that it would send the man into a murderous rage, because the man had been horrifically abusing the child his entire life.

Maybe instigating a physical confrontation in full view of the public was the child’s last desperate attempt to expose the man’s depravity, in the hope that everyone would finally see what’s happening and do something to stop the abuse.

But nobody’s stopping it, because the man has spent years charming and befriending everyone in town — or frightening and intimidating them if that’s easier.

So now everyone’s watching a grown man beat a child to death and pretending they’re watching a fight, when they all know deep down what they’re really watching is a cold-blooded murder by a cold-hearted man, who should have been stopped and locked away a long time ago.

❖

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is saying that Iran could probably start enriching uranium again within a few months, which Iran has said it plans to do, and which Trump has said will result in another US bombing assault.

Trumpers tried to argue that the bombing of Iran was a brilliant strategic maneuver to avoid full-scale war, when it appears to have only made such a war much more likely. Now the president is saying he’ll bomb Iran again if it resumes enriching uranium, something it will probably be able to do quite soon, after giving Iran every reason to start actively seeking a nuclear weapon.

When Iran hawks were arguing against the JCPOA (the Iran nuclear deal laid out during the Obama administration), one of their most common talking points was that it was “kicking the can down the road” to a nuclear-armed Iran in the future. In reality the JCPOA was a remarkable feat of international diplomacy that could have avoided all these needless escalations, and it is Trump and the Iran hawks who have been kicking the can down the road to full-scale war with Iran (if Iran doesn’t get nukes first).

There’s a lot to despise Trump for, but spending both of his terms setting the US on a trajectory toward war with Iran ranks right up around the top of the list. The JCPOA was working fine, but Trump shredded it in 2018 to set us on this path that is only getting darker and darker at a faster and faster pace. Trump chose that course of action to implement his “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran. Trump chose to assassinate Soleimani. Trump chose to bomb Iran. Everything that happens from here on out is Trump’s fault.

_____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my mailing list, social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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“He who saves his country violates no law,” tweeted President Trump in February. He was echoing a line often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. His supporters were electrified by Trump’s tacit invocation of a right to boundless power.

The Trump presidency is already spurring legal battles across the nation. It is far too soon to speculate on Trump’s final win/loss record in federal courts. But Americans should be aware of how the entire judicial process is skewed against holding officialdom liable for its crimes.

Whitewashing torture

The most stunning example of federal impunity is the whitewashing of the Bush administration torture scandal. President George W. Bush unleashed a worldwide torture regime that left victims dead and maimed around the globe. But federal officials and federal judges made sure that not a single torture policymaker or CIA torturer faced any penalty for their barbarity.

Torture policymakers seemed to recognize only one possible adverse consequence from getting rough with their targets. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong,” wrote Jonathan Fredman, the top lawyer for the CIA Counterterrorist Center in 2002. A congressional hearing in June 2008 revealed that “C.I.A. lawyers believed they had found a legal loophole permitting the agency to use ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ methods overseas as long as they did not amount to torture,” the New York Times reported. Fredman warned other federal lawyers involved with sanctifying the interrogation regime: “If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental.”

The official attitude toward killing detainees was stark early on in the case of Gul Rahman. He was captured by U.S. agents in October 2002 and was suspected of being a militant. The CIA subjected Rahman to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower and rough treatment.” Rahman died in November 2002 after effectively freezing to death “after being stripped naked from the waist down and shackled to a cold cement wall in the Salt Pit, where temperatures were approximately 36°F.” Rather than face prosecution for killing Rahman, the primary CIA interrogator was recommended for a $2,500 cash award for his “consistently superior work,” according to a 2014 Senate report.

For government officials, the decisive legal question is not what federal law prohibits but what behavior will be punished. What happens when feds violate the law of the land?

Today’s legal system allows presumed good intentions to almost always exonerate the worst abuses by government officials. As long as they deny criminal intent, they will almost always be absolved by their fellow government employees.

The Intentions Test for government officials becomes almost a tautology. People work for the government because they want to help other people. Therefore, when some government official violated some legal technicality, did he intend to do something bad?

The Bush administration exploited this presumption to argue in secret memos that U.S. government agents could not be found guilty of torture regardless of their conduct. Bush-appointed lawyers showed how easily even the most aggressive interrogators could be free of a torturous intent:

Because Section 2340 [of the federal Anti-Torture Act] requires that a defendant act with the specific intent to inflict severe pain, the infliction of such pain must be the defendant’s precise objective. If the defendant acted knowing that severe pain or suffering was reasonably likely to result from his actions, but no more, he would have acted only with general intent. As a theoretical matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent…. Thus, even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith.

The memo offered the following illustration: “In the context of mail fraud, if an individual honestly believes that the material transmitted is truthful, he has not acted with the required intent to deceive or mislead.” Mailing brochures on bogus cholesterol cures helped set the standard for government employees who maimed detainees who did not confess quickly enough. The memo assured would-be torturers and torture supervisors: “A good faith belief need not be a reasonable one.”

Good-faith torture

Such legal reasoning spawned a world-wide epidemic of “good-faith torture.”

The Justice Department memo recited the damage of 9/11 in order to justify the presumption that torture would prevent similar carnage: “Given the massive destruction and loss of life caused by the September 11 attacks, it is reasonable to believe that information gained from al Qaeda personnel could prevent attacks of a similar (if not greater) magnitude from occurring in the United States.” But a 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report finally released in 2014 concluded that the torture failed to produce any information that prevented terror attacks or saved American lives.

In one of the most stunning assertions, the Justice Department stressed that even intentionally killing people during an interrogation might be okay:

The necessity defense may prove especially relevant in the current circumstances. First, the defense is not limited to certain types of harms. Therefore, the harm inflicted by necessity may include intentional homicide, so long as the harm avoided is greater (i.e., preventing more deaths).

Second, it must actually be the defendant’s intention to avoid the greater harm….

Third, if the defendant reasonably believed that the lesser harm was necessary, even if, unknown to him, it was not, he may still avail himself of the defense….

Clearly, any harm that might occur during an interrogation would pale to insignificance compared to the harm avoided by preventing such an attack, which could take hundreds or thousands of lives.

The Justice Department preemptively exonerated U.S. government officials who violate the Anti-Torture Act: “If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate Section 2340A, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network.” The Justice Department did not explain why preventing a catastrophic attack is the only reason why a suspect might be maimed during interrogation.

The memo sanctified boundless power by stressing the uniqueness of the post–9/11 world: “The situation in which these issues arise is unprecedented in recent American history…. [These] attacks aimed at critical Government buildings in the nation’s capital and landmark buildings in its financial center.” But President James Madison did not announce that the U.S. government was obliged to start torturing people after the British burned down Washington in 1814.

After the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Bush continually stressed America’s good intentions as proof that the U.S. government did not torture. On June 22, 2004, Bush responded to criticism: “Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country…. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.” Bush continually recited his praise about American values whenever he was challenged about the torture he authorized.

Justifying torture

In late 2005, 18 months after leaked memos revealed the Bush administration’s belief that the
Anti-Torture Act was null, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibited the use of “cruel, inhumane, or degrading” interrogation methods. Top Justice Department officials responded to the new law with a secret internal memo declaring that all the interrogation methods currently being used — head slapping, waterboarding, frigid temperatures, and blasting with loud music to assure sleep deprivation — were not “cruel, inhumane or degrading.” The secret torture memos, written by assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury, relied on “a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ‘shocks the conscience’” would go too far.

Other administration officials used the same standard to exonerate themselves. Vice President Dick Cheney, who largely dictated the Bush policy, was asked in a television interview, “What’s the president’s prerogative in the cruel treatment of prisoners?” Cheney invoked the “shocks the conscience” standard, and then mentioned that “what shocks the conscience” is to some extent “in the eye of the beholder.” This standard leaves it up to government officials to decide whether they are personally offended about how they are using their power. If a policy does not shock a politicians’ conscience, it must be okay.

The “shock the conscience” test becomes a slippery slope. The more abuses government commits, the more numb people become. What would have been condemned one year evokes shrugs and yawns a few years later. This becomes Barbarism on the Installment Plan. Cheney publicly declared his approval for simulated drowning of detainees, even though the U.S. government had considered this a war crime for over a century.

In 2007, the New York Times detailed how, after 9/11, the CIA constructed an interrogation program by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture.” For decades, the U.S. government condemned Soviet, Egyptian, and Saudi torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions supposedly provided the model for protecting America in the new millennium.

In a July 2007 executive order, Bush offered a “good intention” definition of torture. Bush stressed that interrogators are prohibited from “intentionally causing serious bodily injury” and “acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of the individual.” Bush banned “willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person … would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation.”

Former Marine Corps Commandant Paul X. Kelley condemned the new guidelines for encouraging abuses: “As long as the intent of the abuse is to gather intelligence or to prevent future attacks, and the abuse is not ‘done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual’ — even if that is an inevitable consequence — the president has given the CIA carte blanche to engage in ‘willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse.’” Georgetown University law professor David Cole noted that Bush’s order “appears to permit cutting or bruising a suspect so long as the injury does not risk death, significant functional impairment or ‘extreme physical pain,’ an entirely subjective term.” The key portion of the executive order — the list of approved interrogation techniques — was kept secret. Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch observed, “All the order really does is to have the president say, ‘Everything in that other document that I’m not showing you is legal — trust me.’”

Thanks to this legal framework, none of the deaths that occurred during interrogations by U.S. government agents were homicides. Instead, they were simply accidents, regardless of how much force was used or how many bones were broken. The CIA made tapes of its vigorous interrogations but destroyed them, even though a federal court had ordered their preservation. Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible crimes because “certifications were given” by the Justice Department which absolved the CIA agents “who permissibly relied on it.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) derided this position “as the Nuremberg defense…. I had authorization and therefore I’m immune from prosecution.”

But the Bush torture policymakers got away with their crimes — thanks in part to President Obama betraying a campaign promise and issuing a blanket exoneration for interrogation abuses.

A license for tyranny

Freedom cannot survive such impunity. The government uses strict liability to judge companies and industries that deal with hazardous substances. With this standard, an individual can be found liable even without proof of negligence or reckless behavior. The more force a government official uses, the more he should be judged by a strict liability standard.

The more power a person seeks, the less credit his unverifiable intentions deserve. Politicians and the media encourage people to judge rulers by the same standard used for aunts and uncles. But good intentions are far more dispositive in private life than in political life. This is especially true of high-ranking government officials, who almost always avoid vigorous courtroom and congressional examinations of their conduct — much less depositions.

“Meant well” is sufficient apology for bone-headed birthday presents but not for the destruction of rights and liberties. The Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution to protect Americans against politicians who claimed good intentions. Nothing has happened in the subsequent centuries to justify giving any politician a good intention license for tyranny.

This article was originally published in the June 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.

The post The Good Intentions License for Tyranny appeared first on LewRockwell.

“It is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses and another to have experience of it also; it is one thing to have ideas of ‘the holy’ and another to become consciously aware of it as an operative reality, intervening actively in the phenomenal world.” — Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

The rock is the color of sand, and unevenly flat, like a scale model of a vast but low mountain range worn down by ancient glaciers. Or, here, by human touch and the gravity of what people carry in their depths to this hallowed ground.

It’s a square that measures roughly 10 feet by 10 feet. It is in the floor of what is called the Church of All Nations, also known as the Church of Gethsemane or the Basilica of Agony, in Jerusalem. It is next to the Garden of Gethsemane and the rock is traditionally believed to be the place where Jesus prayed to God for the last time—Father, take this cup, yet not as I will, but as you will—before he was betrayed by Judas, as he knew he would be, and arrested. The rock is alive. It resonates with the profound history of the Christian faith, takes you back 2,000 years to when and where it all began.

I am standing nearby, a learned and curious observer. The lighting is dim and the sounds are hushed. I watch people approach the rock with what I imagine to be awe, reverence, and most likely some inarticulable blend of many other emotions. Everyone is respectfully silent or speaking in whispered tones. Some people stand and gaze at it, others kneel beside it and for a moment remain there in an attitude of prayer.

The solemnity is occasionally broken. Some people pose to have their pictures taken with the rock behind them, fixing their hair just so for the sake of posterity. Others video the place, their camera lights piercing the dimness like police searchlights, rending the contemplative air. I wonder: What do these people hope to capture. Or remember? Taking photos or videos can project you into the future. You’re hoping to remember a place and time in which you were never really present to begin with. And if you aren’t present in this place, you miss the whole point of being here, which is to affix yourself to the passion of Jesus and pay homage to the life and death of a man who changed the course of humanity by showing us the direct way to God.

This is what I’m thinking when, above the din of the traffic outside and the hushed voices inside, comes the faint and mournful cry of a woman kneeling by the rock. She is dark-skinned and dressed in a bright green sari. There are a few others with her, also with dark skin and in saris of other bright colors, each one standing or kneeling by the rock, some bowing down to kiss it and to lay their foreheads on it. The woman in the green sari lets out a wail, like she’s just learned about the death of her only child, pulls back, then collapses on the marble floor, and is consoled by her companions. Then another woman collapses nearby and is held in the arms of yet another as she gazes up at the vaulted ceiling, painted a deep blue and filled with stars and olive branches, reminiscent of the nearby Garden of Gethsemane at night. Another from the group steps close to the rock, kneels, bows, and lays her forehead upon it, and begins to cry—a little at first, then in big, heaving sobs.

At the time, I was a fledgling theologian. It was June 1999, the summer before my final year as a seminarian in New York City. I took my studies seriously and at one point in those inspiring but difficult years, I concluded that any Christian theologian worth his or her salt had to make a pilgrimage to the place on earth where Jesus Christ lived and died. To sidestep that part of my education felt like someone learning how to cook by studying recipes but never setting foot in a kitchen and making anything. Or learning how to love another by reading about it.

No doubt, the academy was filling my head with new knowledge and the wisdom of the ages, which is an important component of any theological education. But I felt there was no substitute for immersing myself in the geography of where Christianity began. We are all born of a place; we all come from somewhere. And so does religious faith. We can learn a lot about ourselves and others by tracing our historical roots. So too when it comes to religious faith. At the time, this was important to me. And it remains important to me now.

As I watch these women sob at the site of Jesus’ final hours before his crucifixion, I have to admit that all the years up to then, learning from wise professors and from hefty tomes and fragments of primary sources found in the seminary’s catacomb-like library stacks, had done nothing to impress upon me an undeniable feeling for the Christian faith—its complete embodiment—that I was witnessing in these women.

The memory has stayed with me for all these years. I am writing about this now because I’m coming to understand that without feeling rooted—not only to place, but also to an inexpugnable transcendent vision of human existence—we become easy prey for the manipulative whims and dark, shifting winds of certain overlords who have always been with us and who have aspired to nothing else but to render us all into human chattel. They did it during Jesus’ time. And they’re doing it now.

Rudolf Otto (September 25, 1869 – March 6, 1937) was a renowned German theologian and historian of religion. His book, The Idea of the Holy, drawing upon a variety of Western and Eastern sages and informed by personal experience, was one of the defining works of the 20th century. Although his work is inspired by a handful of prominent German thinkers, particularly Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jakob Fries, and Karl Barth, The Idea of the Holy stood out from the theological orthodoxy of that time and foreshadowed the religious explorations that would follow and continue up to the present day.

First published in German in 1917 and in English in 1923, the book has never gone out of print and is now available in some 20 languages. Its full title is The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Consider this title a warning that with this book you’re not getting any “lite” beach reading. To be sure, when I first read sections of it at the seminary, I found much of it impenetrable. I recently read the entire book and still found sections of it, if not impenetrable, then at the very least difficult to understand and absorb. I found myself having to re-read many sentences, and even entire pages, to fully comprehend what Otto was describing. And I really wanted to understand it all because I knew deep in my heart that it was of great value and importance, perhaps now more than ever.

I think part of the reason the book is difficult to understand is due to its origin in the German language and its grammar, which do not always translate easily into English. But another reason is simply because of the subject matter itself. The holy—the entire idea of it that Otto tries to pinpoint and dissect as though under a kind of intellectual microscope—is both simple and complicated. That is, the experience of it, while profound, is simple; writing about it is quite another matter. In other words, Otto claims that we know the holy when we encounter it like we know our own face when we see it reflected back at us, like those women did kneeling at the rock in that church in Jerusalem. But it can be nearly impossible to describe because, as even Otto himself admits, the personal experience of it is almost beyond words. It is, in a word, ineffable.

We may experience the holy but once in our lifetimes or we may have many such experiences, but, in either case, they are always fleeting. Yet, they stay with us. We are changed. Otto calls these fleeting experiences encounters with the “numinous”, a word that Otto coined from the Latin word numen, or divine power, in a similar way that we get the word “ominous” from the Latin word “omen.” Otto described it as a “creature-feeling” or creature-consciousness. Here are Otto’s own words to define this divine power:

“The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane,’ non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

Individual experiences such as these are invaluable because they reveal to us where we stand in the universal and eternal scheme of things: that we are small and insignificant; that we think we know so much but actually know so little. This is an inescapable conundrum of the human condition for those of us with the insight and courage to admit it. Yet, at the same time, these encounters of the holy also impress upon us the capacity to sense and cooperate with a divine authority above all others. We might call this a process of discernment. And it is both liberating and troubling. Once we have had an experience of the divine it should come as no surprise that we can then recognize evil.

And it’s these powers of discernment and divine authority that the contemporary transhumanists stalking the world—just like all dictators throughout history—want to eradicate from us so they can manipulate us and capture us in the physical and virtual web—think of 5G and 6G technology and AI for starters—of their satanic malfeasance. If we lose our connection to the holy, we lose an essential feature of our human nature—our capacity for discernment and our connection to that which is transcendent. Otto himself says as much: “Its disappearance would indeed be an essential loss.” But not only that. Without the holy as a constant presence in our lives we put ourselves at the mercy of those who want to control us, and they are closing in.

Sadly, I think a lot of people have either forsaken this capacity in themselves or have never even known it and, as a result, have unwittingly or enthusiastically given themselves over to the long-running takedown of Western civilization, the final assault of which got underway in 2020 with the COVID-19 psyop, and which is continuing in a myriad of ways today, right up to the recent and fraudulent “No Kings” demonstration that spilled out into streets all over America, funded by—unbeknownst to the riled up participants—as James Howard Kunstler points out, “Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Paypal partner (and Linked-in founder) Reid Hoffman, and father-and son team, George and Alex Soros.” The demonstrators and their backers are much the same coterie who badgered us to “trust the science” and line up to get injected with a so-called vaccine that, as it turned out—and as many of us knew from the get-go—is a bioweapon designed to control and maim and kill us.

I am loathe to give any globalist a fraction of an inch of this column, but we need to know their agenda, and it’s been stated in no uncertain terms by Yuval Noah Harari, a key advisor of that demonic alliance, the World Economic Forum:

“Some governments and corporations, for the first time in history have the power to basically hack human beings. There is a lot of talk about hacking computers and hacking smart phones and hacking bank accounts, but the big story of our era is the ability to hack human beings. And by this I mean, if you have enough data, and computing power, you can understand people better than they understand themselves, and then you can manipulate them in ways which were previously impossible. And in such a situation, the old democratic systems stop functioning. We need to reinvent democracy for this new era in which humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have a soul and spirit and they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me so whatever I chose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this my free will, that’s over.”

It’s not over, I’m here to say, and it will never be over as long as we summon the strength from within to not only turn off in every way possible the globalist’s attempts at “hacking” our minds and bodies and souls, but also by developing and maintaining our capacity to remember the holy. The holy is the foremost antidote to the transhumanist toxicity. But the holy is not something we do. It is something we experience; it’s something that happens to us. It cannot be taught. It cannot be bought. It can only be awakened in the mind, Otto insists, as “everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.” Perhaps most important, according to Otto, it is something that is felt. And this feeling for the numinous is an experience of the divine that, Otto maintains, eludes comprehension in rational terms. We can set out to find it. But more often than not, the transcendent finds us. And it goes way, way back. Otto writes:

“It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’, ‘eerie’, or ‘weird’. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point, for the entire religious development in history…. And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of animism or folk-psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognize this fact of our nature—primary, unique, underivable from anything else—to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.”

Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane perfectly encapsulates this holy awe. It is in light of this ancient numinous experience that we can begin to comprehend the import of this agony. Otto writes: “Can it be ordinary fear of death in the case of one who had had death before his eyes for weeks past and who had just celebrated with clear intent his death-feast with his disciples? No, there is more here than the fear of death; there is the awe of the creature before the mysterium tremendum, before the shuddering secret of the numen.” The women I saw weeping at the stone in the Basilica of Agony seemed to me to have felt this essential and ungovernable “awe of the creature” that Christ must have felt 2000 years ago.

As I watched those women, I felt a little envious of them. I longed to feel what I believed they felt, to trade in the critical and exegetical machinations of my mind for the simple yet profound embodiment of Christ’s passion. When we recall that agony, either there at the rock where Jesus prayed, like those women, or at the altar of the holy feast of the transubstantiated bread and wine, or anywhere else for that matter—when we recall those final hours of the earthly life of Jesus, as he commended us to do during what we call the Last Supper, we unite his agony with our own. It is the agony experienced by anyone who stands up to despots and their evil diktats in the struggle for the individual human sovereignty divinely bestowed upon each of us at birth, nay, even at the moment of our conception.

The Idea of the Holy has had many admirers over the years, including from the very outset the prominent Swiss psychologist, C.G. Jung; the renowned Romanian historian of religion and philosopher, Mircea Eliade; and the celebrated British Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis. Other prominent figures who claim to have been influenced by Otto’s work include Mohandas Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Jünger.

In his 1938 book, Psychology and Religion, Jung defines the numinous as “a dynamic existence or affect, not caused by an arbitrary act of will.” He goes on to say, “On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human subject, which is always its victim than its creator. The numinosum is an involuntary condition of the subject, whatever its cause may be…. The numinosum is either a quality of a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence causing a peculiar alteration of consciousness.” All told, for Jung, the solution to all our dilemmas is found through an encounter with the numinous. Jungian analyst James Hollis writes in his book, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times: “Until we can find that which links us to that which transcends us, in whatever arena we may find it, we will be torn apart… until then, our conflicts have brought us only suffering without meaning.”

In the opening paragraph of Eliade’s notable 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, he praises the original point of view that Otto offers:

“Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience…. Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion, he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto has read Luther and had understood what the ‘living God’ meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers…. it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath.”

In his 1940 book, The Problem of Pain, Lewis offers an extensive depiction of the numinous:

“Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room,’ and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it…. This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.”

Not all encounters with the numinous are dreadful and disturbing; not all are, as Eliade writes, “manifested in the divine wrath.” They can also be serene and sublime. Otto writes of such encounters:

“The awe or ‘dread’ may indeed be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the man’s hair bristle and his limbs quake. But it may also steal upon him almost unobserved as the gentlest of agitations, a mere fleeting shadow passing across his mood. It has therefore nothing to do with intensity, and no natural fear passes over into it merely by being intensified. I may be beyond all measure afraid and terrified without there being even a trace of the feeling of uncanniness in my emotion.”

In The Problem of Pain, Lewis offers what he believes to be the finest example of just such an encounter from the English Romantic-era poet, William Wordsworth, who describes in the first book of his “Prelude” a scene of rowing on a lake one evening in a stolen boat. In the middle of the lake in the quiet of the night, Wordsworth writes:

There hung a darkness, call it solitude Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

There’s another scene in the fourth book of that “Prelude” that to me speaks of the numinous as an experience not of dread—not “a trouble to my dreams”—but of sublime beauty. It reads thus:

And homeward led my steps. Magnificent The morning rose, in memorable pomp, Glorious as e’er I had beheld—in front, The sea lay laughing at a distance; near, The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, Grain-tinctured, drench in empyrean light; And in the meadows and the lower grounds Was all the sweetness of a common dawn— Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds, And labourers going forth to till the fields. Ah! need I say, dear Friend! that to the brim My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walked In thankful blessedness, which yet survives.

I took a seminar in college on the English Romantic poets and it was one of my favorites. I still have the textbook, a thick volume, underlined (of course) in many places and whose spine is cracking from all the use I’ve made of the book over all these years, and from which I copied the lines above. One of the lines from the second example that struck me then and still strikes me today is this:

I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me....

Numinous moments—always unexpected yet sometimes invited or evoked or sought after—change us, set us off in directions we had not previously anticipated. They come and they go. Yet, as Wordsworth knows—and we who have had such encounters know—they yet survive. They live within us and guide us through the rest of our days, help us discern between right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly. Or, in the first example of Wordsworth’s poem, they haunt us. In either case, they become encoded within us and shape who we are in such a way that they cannot be taken from us. And that’s a good thing.

I’ve begun to wonder if these authoritative powers of self-knowledge and discernment and divine authority—what we read in the Letter to the Ephesians as the “armor of God”—can intuitively alert us to the tempting but heinous provocations of illusion and false promises of those wolves in sheep’s clothing that Jesus warns us about, of which the profane realm is chockfull at every turn. And of which we most recently endured in spades during the COVID-19 psyop: Two weeks to stop the spread; masks protect you and those around you; social distancing keeps everyone safe; the school closures, the shutting down of businesses (although, curiously, big box stores and liquor stores were allowed to remain open); the closing of public parks and beaches was for the common good; the COVID-19 vaccines (which were not vaccines) are safe and effective.

Truly, never has there been a greater and more destructive payload of lies rained down upon the human race. I did not fall for these lies and I know many others who did not. And I wonder if having had an initiatory experience of the numinous at some point in our lives—and being attuned to the transcendent as a result—helps us see through the lies of those trying to sell us false promises, be it concerning a used car, a so-called vaccine, or even a way to God. Which is to say that we know Kool-Aid when we see it. And we refuse that cup knowing it is a sham. Or, worse, poison. And perhaps this explains why it’s been so hard for us to get through to others who bought and embraced the lies—and continue to do so. They simply don’t know what the rest of us know. Which gives us no reason to gloat but rather an opportunity to understand.

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The Feast of Corpus Christi, with its traditional public processions, is a call to all people to turn away from worldly cares and worship Christ as a mystical body.

Political obsession is a reality we all have to live with. On any given day, even when we intentionally avoid the news, it seems that we hear Trump’s name at least three times a day. If only people would speak as passionately about our Blessed Lord! Perhaps then we would all be just as Jesus-focused as we currently are Trump-focused. A personal anecdote from the Feast of Corpus Christi highlights this fixation on political disagreements.

In my local Latin Mass church, we have a great devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and every year we are blessed to celebrate Corpus Christi with a solemn procession. Starting from our TLM church, we process to two other Catholic churches that are within walking distance. It’s a beautiful coordination between three Catholic communities that synchronize their Mass times to participate in a shared procession. We arrive with the Blessed Sacrament to each church as they end their Mass. Then we spend time with the Blessed Sacrament, placed on an altar prepared outside of each church. The procession ends back at the first church, and all participants can spend time afterward in fellowship.

Note that only one of these churches celebrates the Latin Mass. The second church celebrates the Novus Ordo in English while the third church celebrates the Novus Ordo in Spanish. Because of this, our Corpus Christi procession is a beautiful celebration exemplifying what true unity inside the Catholic Church should look like. Diversity of race, language, or liturgical preference have no importance when it is time to adore our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, for whom we all prepare a special place of honor in our churches.

Nevertheless, the diversity of race is precisely where the political friction was trying to disrupt our prayer. The third church, as noted above, celebrates Mass in Spanish for a large Hispanic community. As the procession was approaching this church, we began singing prayerful songs in Spanish in admiration of their patron saint. As we arrived, the Hispanic community was joyfully waiting outside for the Blessed Sacrament. The monstrance was placed on their prepared altar, which was generously decorated with flowers. The small children from their community stood behind the altar and threw rose petals beside the altar.

In the middle of adoring the Blessed Sacrament, as rose petals gently flew from the hands of the little ones and hundreds joined in praising God with Spanish songs, we heard a shout from behind us: “ICE is coming!” Many of us did not notice the shout, as it was muffled by the voices singing. However, the same shout was heard a second time from the same voice: “ICE is coming!” And then a third time: “ICE is coming!”

The truth of the matter was ICE was not coming. ICE was nowhere in sight. An actual arrest by an ICE official in our town is practically unheard of, despite the frequent talk about Trump trying to deport every single Hispanic immigrant. Nonsense, of course, and unfounded exaggerations from propagandists. Nonetheless, it still came up in one of the most sacred moments of worship on the Feast of Corpus Christi. In the midst of what should have been an intimate moment of experiencing Heaven on Earth, encouraged by the beautiful assembly of hundreds from different Catholic church communities, someone had to raise political frictions.

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David Krall wrote:

“to be the greatest president in American history.”

Sorry, that ship has already sailed.

 

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Writes Tim McGraw:

Hi Lew,

I enjoyed reading your latest article on the Libertarian (Rothbard’s) position on nuclear weapons. It’s interesting that so many nuclear bombs have been set off in the Northern Hemisphere vs. the Southern Hemisphere that the Northern Hemisphere has more background radiation than the Southern Hemisphere. There is no safe level of radiation.

After Fukushima, one almost feels like they need a Geiger Counter to buy fish from the Pacific at the market. Odd that no one tested nuclear weapons in the Atlantic Ocean. Gee, I wonder why.

“Mommy! Why is the salmon in the fridge glowing?”

Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate and shouldn’t be allowed. Poison gas has been outlawed, as has germ warfare. Why not ban nuclear weapons?

 

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