Lew Rockwell Institute

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Matt Taibbi

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When a just war of defense turns into a war of revenge, it ceases to be a just war and becomes an unjust war of aggression. That explains why Robert E. Lee—who followed the conventions of civilized warfare agreed upon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—saw his role as defense of the South, and not as aggression against the North. In 1863, he said:

It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.

In “The War Against the South and Its Consequences” Murray Rothbard points out that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, by contrast with Lee, abandoned all such conventions and launched a total war against civilians. Rothbard explains:

Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized “rules of war” that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman’s march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism).

Veale attributes the blame for Sherman’s war strategy, particularly the attacks on civilians, to Lincoln:

Sherman only executed the most dramatic and devastating example of the strategy which was laid down by President Lincoln himself and followed faithfully by General Ulysses S. Grant as commander-in-chief of the Northern armies.

It was the deliberate policy of the Union army to view Southern civilians as no different from combatants. As reported in “War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies” published in 1880–1901, Sherman stated, “We will remove and destroy every obstacle—if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” Sherman’s apologists do not deny his total war tactics; on the contrary, they argue that these tactics were justified for various reasons including the claim that his war crimes were necessary in order to win the war.

In his book War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, Walter Brian Cisco examines the evidence in the Official Records concerning the Union war strategy. Cisco recounts civilian homes in Athens, Alabama being invaded, looted, and burned to “retaliate” against Confederates who were attacking Federal troops, and to discourage the civilian population from supporting the “rebels.” Federal troops also broke into businesses and looted the premises. Significantly, none of these actions were condemned by Union officers—they were seen as just punishment against the South. Cisco gives many examples of this:

“Everything of value was carried out of dry goods stores, jewelry stores and drug stores,” remembered Indiana sergeant George H. Puntenney. “The sacking of Athens has often been condemned,” he concluded, but “was about what those Athenian rebels deserved.”

In another example, Major James Austin Connolly said,

We’ll burn every house, barn, church, and everything else we come to; we’ll leave their families houseless and without food; their towns will all be destroyed, and nothing but the most complete desolation will be found in our track.

In Tennessee, Sherman destroyed an entire town, Randolph, to retaliate against an attack by Confederate guerillas on a steamboat docked in the town. Sherman wrote, “Immediately I sent a regiment up with orders to destroy the place. The regiment has returned and Randolph is gone.” His approach to Atlanta was the same, as he declared, “Let us destroy Atlanta and make it a desolation. One thing is certain, whether we get inside Atlanta or not, it will be a used up community by the time we are done with it.” Cisco recounts that, “As many as five thousand rounds of shot and shell fell on Atlanta that one day… It went on day and night for another three weeks.” It was obvious that civilian casualties would be a direct result of this shelling, and such casualties were not merely “collateral damage.” Deliberately destroying civilian homes to avenge Confederate attacks was not unusual. Major General Hunter, when he heard that Confederates had attacked one of his supply trains in the Shenandoah Valley, “was furious, ordering the torching of houses in the neighborhood where his loss had occurred.”

Many people suppose that the burning of the South may have been some sort of accident. They presume that a fire somehow started, the winds picked up, and the rest is history. The truth is that Sherman considered burning civilian property to be a justified form of retaliation against Confederate soldiers. He said “everything is right which prevents anything. If bridges are burned [by the Confederate armies], I have a right to burn all houses near it.” Explosive charges were buried throughout Atlanta before the fires were lit. Sherman wrote, “commence the destruction [of Atlanta] at once, but don’t use fire until the last moment.” Ohio captain George W. Pepper commented, as the city lay in smoking ruins, “This is the penalty of rebellion.” There is plenty of evidence that the fires were deliberately lit. For example,

The Medical College was spared when Dr. Peter D’Alvigny confronted soldiers igniting straw and broken furniture they had piled in the entrance hall. The doctor shouted that sick and wounded soldiers were still inside, throwing open the door to prove it.

Nor was there any attempt to ensure that only property belonging to slave owners was burned which, although also illegal, may have been regarded by some people as morally justified. However, the burning was indiscriminate. No attempt was made to ascertain who owned the burned homes, nor to ensure that slaves would not also be punished along with slave owners. Cisco recounts many examples of plantation homes that were deliberately burned by Union troops:

Troops fired the gin house, granary, and a large quantity of cloth. “The Negroes went out and begged for the cloth,” wrote Mrs Canning, “saying that it was to make their winter clothes. The cruel destroyers refused to let the Negroes have a single piece.” “Well, madam,” sneered one of the soldiers, “how do you like the looks of our little fire. We have seen a great many such, within the last few weeks.”

Rage and fury in the heat of battle, undisciplined soldiers behaving badly, and the urge to retaliate for losses, are often shrugged off as understandable human reactions in the chaos of wartime. However, Robert E. Lee insisted that his army should not fight for vengeance, following a well-established convention that armies should not retaliate against soldiers by attacking civilians or burning their property. Throughout the first and second world wars—when the allies were accused of indiscriminately bombing German towns, killing civilians, and destroying their property—their response was to (emphatically, albeit dishonestly) deny it. The point here is not to endorse dishonesty in brazenly denying war crimes—the point is that, by bothering to deny war crimes, the combatants at least exhibit awareness that war crimes are abhorrent and nothing of which to be proud. Unlike Sherman’s apologists, they did not attempt to argue that bombing civilians is justified, nor are there annual celebrations of the bombing of Dresden the way some American academics annually celebrate the burning of Georgia and South Carolina.

The convention in Europe, as noted by Veale, was that “hostilities between civilized peoples must be limited to the armed forces actually engaged.” As Veale notes, any European state that broke this convention did not attempt to claim that there are circumstances where breaking the convention is justified: “for two hundred years it was acknowledged by all the European States. In the main it was complied with and, when infringed, was paid the tribute of indignant denials.” As David Gordon observes in “The Historical Origins of Modern American War Crimes,” the conventions described by Veale have now wrongly been abandoned, in favor of the horrendous view that “shock and awe” attacks on civilians are acceptable in the name of bringing a “quick end” to the war:

In the American context, a great deal of horrendous conduct stems from the Civil War, and one thing Moyn brings out is the role of the “Lieber code”, a guide to conduct for the American armed forces written by the German immigrant Francis Lieber, in this matter. Moyn says, “Lieber refused to pity victims of war. Lieber’s code went in a different direction, legalizing shock and awe, with humanity a fringe benefit rather than a true goal…. Erected as one of its founding fathers later, Lieber was not really part of the tradition of making war humane. He condoned horrendous acts such as punishing civilians and denying quarter—which meant that, when enemies surrendered in hopes of avoiding death, you could kill them anyway.” (pp. 19–20)

As Samuel Moyn points out, “For Lieber, anything necessary in war, more or less, ought to be legal; if there was such a thing as excess violence and suffering, it was because it was necessary to achieve victory, which hastened peace.” Those who rightly desire peace have wrongly adopted Lieber’s opinion that the end justifies the means, and that to hasten a peaceful future any and all war crimes are justified. After the war is won, the atrocities are memory holed. As Veale puts it, “As the war had been won, it did not seem to matter very much how it had been won.” Thus, further steps are taken in the “advance to barbarism.”

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

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Trump sided with the Israelis, asserting that Iran was ‘very close’ to having a bomb, and added that he didn’t care what Gabbard thinks.

The IAEA Board’s ‘Non-Compliance’ Resolution on 12 June 2025 was the planned precursor for Israel’s ‘bolt from the blue’ strike on Iran the next day. Israelis say the plan to go to war with Iran was grounded in ‘the opportunity’ to strike, and not the intelligence that Iran was speeding towards a bomb (that was the peg for war).

Alastair Crooke

The sudden claim of Iran being very close to a bomb (that seemingly jumped out of ‘nowhere’ to leave Americans puzzling how could it happen that – in the blink of eye, we are going to war – was subsequently refuted by IAEA Chief Grossi to CNN on 17 June (but only after the abrupt attack on Iran already had taken place):

“We did not have any evidence of a systematic effort [by Iran] to move to a nuclear weapon”, Grossi confirmed on CNN.

This statement drew the following riposte from Iran by its Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei on 19 June:

“This is too late, Mr. Grossi – you obscured this truth in your absolutely biased report that was instrumentalized by E3/U.S. to craft a resolution with baseless allegation of [Iranian] ‘non-compliance’; the same resolution was then utilized, as a final pretext, by a genocidal warmongering regime to wage a war of aggression on Iran and to launch an unlawful attack on our peaceful nuclear facilities. Do you know how many innocent Iranians have been killed/maimed as a result of this criminal war? You turned IAEA into a tool of convenience for non-NPT members to deprive NPT members of their basic right under Article 4. Any clear conscience?!”.

To which Dr Ali Larijani, Advisor to the Supreme Leader, added:

“When the war ends, we will hold the director of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, accountable”.

What they are saying:

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s Statement, in relation to the escalation of the Iranian-Israeli conflict –

“It was precisely these “sympathisers” [EU3] who exerted pressure on the leadership of the [IAEA] Agency to prepare a controversial “comprehensive assessment” of Iran’s nuclear programme, the flaws of which were subsequently exploited to push through a biased anti-Iran resolution at the IAEA Board of Governors on 12 June [2025]. This resolution effectively provided a green light to actions by West Jerusalem, leading to tragedy” [i.e. to the sneak attack on the immediate day after, 13 June].

Behind the scenes:

The underpinnings to the 12 June 2025 IAEA Resolution – giving pretext for Israel to strike Iran (and crafted to sway President Trump to dismiss his own Director of National Intelligence’s warnings that there was no evidence of Iran moving towards weaponisation) – reportedly were drawn not from Mossad or other western intelligence services, but from IAEA software. As DD Geo-politics outlines, since 2015, the IAEA has relied on Palantir’s Mosaic platform, a $50-million AI system that sifts through millions of data points – satellite imagery, social media, personnel logs – to predict nuclear threats:

“Iran’s stockpile [of enriched uranium] had been growing steadily for months—yet the narrative of an imminent breakthrough surged only after the IAEA’s censure on June 6, 2025. That resolution, adopted 19–3, provided Israel the diplomatic cover it needed. Palantir’s Mosaic platform played a critical role in this pivot. Its data shaped the May 31 report, flagging anomalies at Fordow and Lavisan-Shian, and recycling prior allegations from Turquzabad—despite years-old Iranian denials and sabotage … Mosaic was conceived originally to identify insurgent activity in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

Its algorithm looks to identify and infer ‘hostile intent’ from indirect indicators – metadata, behavioral patterns, signal traffic – not from confirmed evidence. In other words, it postulates what suspects may be thinking, or planning. On 12 June, Iran leaked documents, which it claimed showed IAEA chief Rafael Grossi sharing Mosaic outputs with Israel. By 2018, Mosaic had processed more than 400 million discrete data objects and had helped impute suspicion to over 60 Iranian sites such as to justify unannounced IAEA inspections of those sites, under the JCPOA. These outputs, though dependent largely on the algorithmic equations, were incorporated into formal IAEA safeguard reports and were widely accepted by UN member states and non-proliferation regimes as credible, evidence-based assessments. Mosaic however is not a passive system. It is trained to infer from its algorithm hostile intent, but when repurposed for nuclear oversight, its equations risk translating simple correlation into malicious intent.

What leading Israeli commentators are saying:

Leading Israeli centre-right commentator, Ben Caspit (Ma’ariv):

“Was Iran’s ‘breakthrough’ to the nuclear weapon actually detected? Probably not. Was the [Supreme] Leader’s “order” to achieve a military nuclear weapon actually given? Probably not. So why did we go to war? Because there was no choice. They were promoting an Israeli annihilation plan and we had no choice… October 7: A cold shower woke up an entire country. All those involved need to understand that anyone who contemplates our destruction will be destroyed. Eyes on the ball and a bullet between the eyes … From now on, every move one of our enemies makes somewhere must be followed by action. Every snake’s head that rises must be beheaded … And there is something else: the rare and one-time historical window of opportunity that suddenly opened before us … All of this made the decision to go to this war the right one … Netanyahu is currently in euphoria”.

Israeli commentator, Nahum Barnea (Yedioth Ahoronot):

“The decision to start a war was all Netanyahu’s. And here he is, deciding and responsible: all the credit is his. Trump gave Israel the green light to start a war, provided that it does not present America as a partner and responsible. The Trump method does not distinguish between Zelensky’s Ukraine and Khamenei’s Iran: humiliation along the way is the guarantee of an agreement in the end”.

Israeli & NY Times commentator, Ronan Bergman (Yedioth Ahoronot):

“The need for the series of assassinations last week first emerged as a thought last September, among senior officials in Unit 8200, the research division in the Intelligence Directorate, the Mossad, and other parts of the system. The trigger was the defeat inflicted by the IDF on Hezbollah, followed by the successful attack on Iran and the destruction of its air defence system in October, followed in December by the collapse of the Assad regime in Damascus and the destruction of its air defence system by the IDF. The sequence of events led many senior Israeli officials to believe that an unprecedented opportunity had arisen, a window of a lifetime, to attack Iran… And so the beheading forum, which decided the fates of scientists thousands of miles away, sat down and decided who would be ranked at level A – the highest importance – and who at levels B, C or D – the lowest”.

Big Picture:

Seemingly, Trump had been convinced by Netanyahu, Ron Dermer and CENTOM’s General Kurilla (Politico reports that Kurilla was instrumental in persuading Trump that DNI Tulsi Gabbard was wrong in her assessment that Iran had ‘no bomb’). Trump sided with the Israelis, asserting that Iran was “very close” to having a bomb, and added that he ‘didn’t care what she [Gabbard] thinks’. Trump did speculate out loud – the day before the sneak 13 June – that an Israeli attack (on Iran) “could speed [up] a deal”. There is little doubt that Syria’s unexpectedly sudden ‘fall’ galvanized the neo-cons to imagine they might quickly repeat the exercise in Iran. This is why, too, so much emphasis is beinglaid on assassinating the Supreme Leader. When Iran did not collapse; when the Iranian system rebooted itself unexpectedly swiftly; and when Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel began, the pro-Israeli bloc panicked and exerted tremendous pressure on Trump for the U.S. to enter the war on Israel’s behalf.

This left Trump facing a terrible dilemma – having to choose between the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis – either to alienate his MAGA support base (who voted for him precisely to prevent the U.S. joining another forever war (thus likely causing a GOP loss at the next midterms)), or to alienate his ultra-rich Jewish donors (such as Miriam Adelson, whose money holds sway over Congress, and whose resources are harnessed by the Deep State to pursue mutual interests with the Israeli-Firsters), who would turn against him.

Shades of Iraq and the Colin Powell role…

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

The post The Key Nuclear Allegation That Started the War Was Coaxed From a Palantir Counter-Intelligence Algorithm appeared first on LewRockwell.

Everybody cut the bullshit for once. Trump wasn’t “dragged into” this war. He and Netanyahu knowingly manufactured it, through the fake negotiations of his fake diplomat Witkoff, engineered to give Israel the pretext for launching the war, which he officially joined 9 days later. Michael Tracey, political analyst, X

“Humanity has come too far as a species to allow a lawless bully to take us back to the law of the jungle.” Sayed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Foreign Minister, 2 minutes https://twitter.com/i/status/1936278121818571172

First, let’s state the obvious: Trump’s pinprick attacks on Iran inflicted “no substantial damage” to their nuclear facilities. The bunker busting bombs did apparently strike near the entry of two of the facilities, but those sites were already locked down (evacuated?) in preparation for the bombing. The government announced on Sunday that all the enriched uranium at those sites had already been taken to safe locations “several days before”, in fact, the government had already published satellite photos of the closed sites 48 hours before the attacks. So, while the attacks have significant symbolic value (and could serve as a pretext to WW3), the damage was minimal and will not significantly set back Iran’s nuclear program. This is from military analyst, Will Schryver:

So … not only has the fake “bunker buster” attack failed to “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear facilities, but it will likely result in Iran withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty, and formally joining the nuclear club.

Utterly genius move by the imbeciles in Washington

So, why did Trump give the green light for such a risky operation when nearly all the experts warned that the 30,000-pound GBU-57 “bunker busting” bomb was not going to work? (See: “The bunker buster bombs will have a very low rate of success. There is no question about it.” Professor Ted Postol, weapons expert

Video Link

It’s clear to many people that Donald Trump is controlled by powerful Zionist billionaires and the influential Jewish lobby that has spread its tentacles across the political landscape and now dictates US foreign policy. The attack on Iran shows conclusively that Trump is not acting in the interests of the United States whose troops and military bases have been put in harm’s way. No, this bloody operation is designed to advance the Israeli agenda by eliminating Israel’s main rival in the region. America gains nothing from a war with Iran and Trump knows it.

So far, Iran has refrained from attacking US facilities in the region but has intensified its attacks on Israel which it regards as the ‘head of the snake.’ Early Sunday, Iran unleashed its 20thwave of retaliatory missile strikes called Operation True Promise 3 which destroyed a biological research center, alternative command and control centers, and large parts of Ben Gurion Airport. Iran also caused vast destruction in a residential neighborhood in Tel Aviv using its latest hypersonic ballistic missile which struck its target without triggering sirens in Israel. (There are also unconfirmed reports that Iran struck Israel’s Soreq Nuclear Center, although the extent of the damage is not yet known. Also, Iran destroyed the top-secret biological and chemical weapons center in Ness Ziona, 20 km from Tel Aviv.)

Experts conclude that Iran is prepared to endure a war of attrition with Israel for at least six months. It’s stockpile of ballistic missiles is not only deep but surpasses the current capability of the United States or Israel combined. In short, Iran is a hypersonic missile superpower with an offensive capability that is downplayed by analysts in the West, but which exceeds any similar projectiles in either Washington’s or Tel Aviv’s arsenal. Iran’s daily precision attacks on military, intelligence and critical infrastructure targets in Israeli cities attests to the impressive strides Iran has made in missile technology and proves beyond a doubt that Israel’s vaunted air-defense systems are simply no match for Iran’s state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles. We expect that it will take no more than a couple weeks for Israeli leaders to realize that they have “bitten off more than they can chew” and that –even with US support– Israel’s primary symbols of strength and resilience are being systematically reduced to rubble by an enemy that is far more prepared and capable than themselves. This is from a post by Dmitry Medvedev, former president of Russia, who explains “what the Americans accomplished with their nighttime strikes on three nuclear sites in Iran?”

1. Critical infrastructure of the nuclear fuel cycle appears to have been unaffected or sustained only minor damage.
2. The enrichment of nuclear material — and, now we can say it outright, the future production of nuclear weapons — will continue.
3. A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.
4. Israel is under attack, explosions are rocking the country, and people are panicking.
5. The US is now entangled in a new conflict, with prospects of a ground operation looming on the horizon.
6. Iran’s political regime has survived — and in all likelihood, has come out even stronger.
7. The people are rallying around the country’s spiritual leadership, including those who were previously indifferent or opposed to it.
8. Donald Trump, once hailed as ‘president of peace,’ has now pushed the US into another war.
9. The vast majority of countries around the world oppose the actions of Israel and the United States.
10. At this rate, Trump can forget about the Nobel Peace Prize — not even with how rigged it has become.

What a way to kick things off, Mr. President. Congratulations! Dmitry Medvedev@MedvedevRussiaE https://twitter.com/MedvedevRussiaE/status/1936725544017567860

This is a fairly evenhanded analysis of Saturday’s attack: Nothing was gained and much was lost. At the same time, the great majority of the world’s population is now convinced that the threat of US and Israeli aggression is too great to ignore and must be countered by any means necessary. The surprise attack on Iran during nuclear negotiations merely underscores the need for a more forceful approach to Washington and Tel Aviv’s relentless interventions. We should be grateful that Iran is spearheading the move to defend international law and demonstrate its courageous opposition to US-Israel’s endless wars of choice.

As for Iran, well, according to an article at Press TV:

In a decisive response to the US aggression against Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities, the Iranian parliament has voted to close the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. A senior Iranian lawmaker, Esmaeil Kowsari, said on Sunday that the Majlis (Iranian parliament) has agreed to close the key artery for global energy trade in response to the American aggression and the silence of the international community.

Kowsari, a member of the parliament’s committee on national security and foreign policy, said lawmakers have reached a consensus on the closure of the strait, though the final decision rests with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.

“The parliament has come to the conclusion that it should close the Hormuz Strait, but the final decision lies with the Supreme National Security Council,” Kowsari stated. Press TV

So, along his other triumphs in Ukraine, Yemen and Syria, the blustery Trump can now boast that his misguided air strikes on Iran triggered a blockade of the world’s most critical energy chokepoint sending equities markets into freefall while the global economy ground to a standstill. Is there no end to this man’s achievements?

Personally, I have always thought that Trump was going to lead the attack on Iran. war on Iran. Here’s a clip from an article I wrote on November 6, 2024, shortly after Trump was elected:

Why was Trump allowed to win the election?…..

As it happens, the deep state –which unconditionally supports the state of Israel– needs Donald Trump. They need a charismatic, populist firebrand to boost recruitment and spearhead the rush to war. Harris can’t do that. Harris had trouble attracting even a hundred supporters to her rallies.

No, this is a task for a leader that is trusted, admired and loved. This is a task for a man who has credibility with the red state young men who traditionally fight our wars. This is a job for Trump…. No president has ever demonstrated more unwavering loyalty to Israel than Donald J Trump

It’s clear that Trump is regarded by many Israelis as an American messiah who will deploy his legions of young men to the Middle East to smite Israel’s enemies and help the Jewish state emerge as the regional hegemon. That’s the hope at least; the reality may be far different. But the point we’re trying to make is that Trump’s utility to Israel may have been a critical factor in the deep state’s approach to the 2024 presidential elections. Of course, that is just my own conspiratorial point of view. Trump’s Triumph and the Firing of Yoav Gallant, Unz Review

Check out this 1-minute video of Trump boasting that billionaire Zionists dictate US foreign policy.

Trump to Israeli American Council:

“Miriam and Sheldon Adelson came to the White House just about more than anybody…” referring to $100m x 2 donor Miriam and her late husband, founder of Los Vegas Sands casinos.

(Sep 20, 2024) pic.twitter.com/JLZEREU038

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 31, 2024

Iran now finds itself embroiled in a fight to the death with two powerful adversaries that want to topple their government, erase their civilization and install a puppet regime that will follow their directives. Iran has no choice but to accept this challenge and lead the struggle against aggression, starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Iran stands on the side of humanity, decency and peace. We hope they prevail.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz review.

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Over the last nine months, I’ve worked to bring the public’s attention to dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) a forgotten natural therapy which rapidly treats a wide range of conditions and that many studies have shown is very safe (provided it’s used correctly), and, most importantly (thanks to the 1994 DSHEA act which legalized all natural therapies) is now readily available. Since I believe DMSO has immense potential to offer the medical community and individual patients, I’ve diligently worked to compile evidence that best supports its rediscovery. As such, throughout this series, I’ve presented over a thousand studies that DMSO effectively treats:

Strokes, paralysis, a wide range of neurological disorders (e.g., Down Syndrome and dementia), and many circulatory disorders (e.g., Raynaud’s, varicose veins, hemorrhoids), which I discussed here.

A wide range of tissue injuries, such as sprains, concussions, burns, surgical incisions, and spinal cord injuries (discussed here).

Chronic pain (e.g., from a bad disc, bursitis, arthritis, or complex regional pain syndrome), which I discussed here.

A wide range of autoimmune, protein, and contractile disorders, such as scleroderma, amyloidosis, and interstitial cystitis (discussed here).

A variety of head conditions, such as tinnitus, vision loss, dental problems, and sinusitis (discussed here).

A wide range of internal organ diseases, such as pancreatitis, infertility, liver cirrhosis, and endometriosis (discussed here).

A wide range of skin conditions, such as burns, varicose veins, acne, hair loss, ulcers, skin cancer, and many autoimmune dermatologic diseases (discussed here).

Many challenging infectious conditions, including chronic bacterial infections, herpes, and shingles (discussed here).

Many aspects of cancer (e.g., many of cancer’s debilitating symptoms, making cancer treatments more potent, greatly reducing the toxicity of conventional therapies, and turning cancer cells back into normal cells), which I discussed here.

Fortunately, much in the same way DMSO caught on in the 1960s, providing that evidence has allowed it to make a rapid resurgence (e.g., I’ve now received over 2,000 stories from readers who have often had remarkable improvements from using it).

Combination Therapies

DMSO’s ability to treat a wide range of illnesses results from it having a variety of highly unusual properties that appear to address the root causes of disease. At the same time however, since DMSO has so many different therapeutic mechanisms (e.g., increasing parasympathetic activity, increase circulation, regenerating senescent cells, being highly anti-inflammatory, blocking pain conduction etc.), despite having now reviewed thousands of studies on it, there is still a great deal I do not understand about the substance. As such, one of the greatest challenges throughout this series has been to avoid claiming anything about the substance that’s not supported by the existing scientific literature, particularly when it’s a question many want answers to.

DMSO is one of the most studied, yet still poorly understood, pharmaceutical
products of our time.

Note: after seeing this quote, I queried a few AI systems, which concluded that between 50,000 to 100,000 studies have been published on the medical and chemical properties of DMSO.

One of DMSO’s most noteworthy abilities is its ability to enhance the effects of other substances, which in many cases makes it possible to surmount major dilemmas traditionally seen with those therapies. Unfortunately, since there is an almost infinite number of substances one could combine with DMSO’s function as a “vehicle” remains one of the least studied aspects of the compound, and is specifically for that reason I had this subject be the last major part of the series. Likewise, over the years I have come up with so many different potentially promising therapeutic DMSO combinations, but I still have not been able to try most of them.

This is particularly important, as while DMSO helps the majority of recipients (e.g., around 85-90% of readers reported relief from chronic pain) in many instances where DMSO alone is not sufficient to address an ailment (e.g., pain), a combination therapy will.

Note: DMSO (alone or combined with other agents) can be administered in a variety of ways such as a liquid (sometimes applied with a cotton swab, brush, or gauze), a cream, gel, roll-on or spray; taken internally as an oral solution, infusion, or injection; nebulized or used as eye drops, ear drops, nasal drops, mouth rinses, enemas, and bladder irrigations. In many cases, multiple modalities are done concurrently (e.g., oral and topical DMSO is often quite helpful for systemic arthritis).

Combining DMSO

In pharmacology, DMSO is often referred to as a “vehicle” that helps other drugs get into the body. Because of this, while DMSO only has one approved (intravesical) use (which has led to many thinking it must not be safe), a variety of drugs are on the market that use DMSO as a vehicle to bring them inside the body. This is because DMSO is a unique solvent that:

• Will pass through biological membranes without damaging them (which is extremely unusual and believed to be due to its exchange and interchange with water in biological membranes).
Note: in addition to not harming the skin, when tested with other substances that could enter the brain, DMSO was not observed to alter the cells lining the blood-brain barrier or the brain tissue.

• Once it contacts the skin, it rapidly spreads throughout the body (e.g., within an hour of being applied to the skin, it can be found within the bones and teeth).
Note: DMSO does not penetrate tooth enamel or nails.

• It is a highly potent solvent that can dissolve a wide range of substances.

• If a substance is dissolved within DMSO, DMSO can typically bring it into the body. While a few other substances can also serve as vehicles, DMSO is the most potent in pharmacology (e.g., this study found that DMSO was more effective than propylene glycol at delivering topical steroids into the body).

Note: after a report of copper chloride and DMSO coloring someone’s skin, a team attempted to replicate this effect with a variety of dyes but were unable to do so (nor could they alter autoimmune skin discoloration).

• In addition to bringing substances into the body, DMSO also greatly increases circulation and by taking the place of water (as it is small, can form hydrogen bonds and is relatively polar) while being both fat and water soluble, changes the permeability of the cell membrane, allowing new things to enter the cell and waste products to leave cells. As a result, DMSO is able to both spread what it transports throughout the body and significantly enhance the body’s innate ability to circulate what has already been absorbed (including to previously inaccessible areas).

As such, DMSO enables the topical administration of drugs that would normally require injection, and in many cases, can significantly increase their potency (e.g., because it penetrates deep regions of the body that pharmaceuticals typically have difficulty entering or because it bypasses the barrier that cells have to foreign substances).

Note: there are likely other reasons why DMSO increases the potency of substances mixed with it, but the ones I’ve looked at are more speculative and did not have enough evidence supporting them.

Decades ago, I had a friend who used DMSO to get high by mixing it with street drugs who shared that the high from it was much stronger than what one would experience from injecting the drug (which is traditionally the strongest high one can experience) and that their group quickly realized they could only do this with pharmaceutical grade drugs as street preparations had a variety of impurities which frequently made them get quite ill when taking them. About ten years after sharing this with me, my friend died from a drug overdose (which did not involve DMSO). In contrast, most of the people I know who’ve mixed DMSO with natural substances either had positive to neutral experiences at worst.

In my eyes, there are a few key lessons from this story:

1. One of the major risks of DMSO is applying it to the skin if a toxic substance is already present. For example, in 1965, the German Magazine Der Spiegel (No. 19) shared that the original investigator of DMSO:

[Herschler] wanted to investigate whether certain highly toxic pesticides were soluble in DMSO. The researcher felt how soluble they were when he sprayed some of the solution onto his skin. DMSO transported the poison into the body within minutes. The poison worked: Herschler temporarily suffered from impaired consciousness and shortness of breath.

Likewise, within the thousands of comments I’ve received here, a reader shared a case they heard of where someone accidentally got a (fortunately non-fatal) overdose of nicotine because it was on the skin DMSO was applied to, causing it to be rapidly absorbed into their system.

Because of this, we always emphasize the importance of cleaning the application area before applying DMSO. Remarkably, aside from these precautions, to the best of my knowledge, no one has reported (either to me personally, in the literature, or within the DMSO community) becoming seriously ill from applying DMSO to skin that had a contaminant or toxin on it. This suggests that users have been consistently diligent about cleaning beforehand, or that the actual risk is limited to highly toxic substances—i.e., most compounds typically present on the skin are not harmful enough to cause systemic toxicity when absorbed through DMSO.

Note: one possible explanation for this unexpected outcome is that DMSO, as a bidirectional “channel opener,” may not only enhance the absorption of compounds into tissues but also facilitate their excretion—helping to mitigate any potential harm.

2. Many agents will become significantly more potent when mixed with DMSO. With natural substances, this is generally not an issue (as their potency and toxicity are typically much less than pharmaceuticals), but it is still a real risk to consider. Despite this, I have not run into reports (either in the literature or from readers) of a natural combination DMSO therapy creating serious issues (which was quite surprising).

3. Since very little quality control exists for them, one of the major problems with street drugs are all the things they are cut with (or impurities that accumulate during the manufacturing process). For this reason, even though many people over the years have used DMSO as a creative way to get high, I strongly advise against doing this (especially since there is also the risk of an overdose if too much is given at one time).

4. This same impurity issue could apply to anything else too. For this reason, whenever making DMSO mixes that others have had success with, it is essential to obtain a pure mixture (e.g., many pharmaceutical and supplement preparations contain multiple ingredients beyond the primary pharmaceutical).
Note: I am now receiving stories from readers who’ve had success using DMSO combined with hematoxylin to treat cancer (which is a remarkably effective cancer treatment). The standard hematoxylin preparations are bound to a [toxic] metal because this makes them better able to stain tissues than pure hematoxylin. For this reason, I’ve tried to emphasize the importance of only mixing DMSO with pure hematoxylin.

As such, caution should be taken when taking potent pharmaceuticals at the same time as DMSO. Presently, I’ve reviewed a lot of published reports and reader stories where a pharmaceutical drug was mixed with DMSO and applied topically with no issues following, however to the best of my knowledge, none of those were with drugs that can easily cause overdoses. The one exception comes from Jim McCann (a longtime DMSO practitioner), who reported seeing cases of individuals becoming seriously ill when an IV was given that contained both DMSO and an (unspecified) anticoagulant or steroid. Given that topical preparations of heparin (which was the IV only anticoagulant in use at McCann’s time) and steroids mixed with DMSO have caused no issues in clinical trials, if his observations were correct (which they may not have been), I suspect they resulted from both being infused together in an IV.

At the same time however, while drug potentiation is a potential safety concern, it is also invaluable in medicine. This is because frequently, it is quite difficult to get a drug to its target site in the body, requiring sustained high doses of it so that enough of the drug arrives at the target site (which can require exposing the body to a toxic dose).

DMSO Drug Interactions

Given DMSO’s ability to potentiate pharmaceuticals, this raises an obvious question—is it safe to take it alongside other drugs? The best answer I can share is that:

• Most of the combinations have not been studied, particularly those that entered the market after the 1960, and hence are unknown (much in the same way many interactions between approved pharmaceuticals are almost entirely unknown).

• Many DMSO authors (to play it safe) advise not taking DMSO if you are taking pharmaceuticals, which in my eyes is useless advice as 61% of Americans are on at least one and the people who tend to need DMSO the most tend to be on numerous ones for their symptoms.

•DMSO’s potentiation is the strongest if taken alongside a drug (e.g., particularly if both are in an IV infusion), and it is generally thought that if there is a two hour separation between them, the potentiation is much less.

•While it potentiates drugs, DMSO can also mitigate many toxicities of pharmaceuticals (e.g. gentamicin’s kidney toxicity).

• If a pharmaceutical is fairly toxic (e.g., gadolinium for an MRI), it’s generally a good policy not to take it alongside DMSO.

• In many cases, DMSO reduces the amount of a drug needed to get the desired effect (which is quite helpful if the drug is toxic at the prescribed dose but nonetheless continued out of necessity). Because of this, it’s essential to monitor the effects of the drugs you are taking and determine if lower doses are indicated due to DMSO’s potentiation (or DMSO healing the underlying problem that the drug was being prescribed to address).

• Likewise if you are taking other drugs, starting with a low dose of DMSO and gradually working it up is advised (so you can monitor for side effects).

• Severe drug reactions from concurrently taking DMSO and another drug are actually quite rare and the DMSO community has found most drugs can be taken alongside DMSO.

Presently, the specifics we know on this topic are as follows:

• In a 1967 report of 500 cases, investigators noted that a few of the patients concurrently on a medication (2 on insulin, 2 on digitalis, 1 on nitroglycerine and 1 on quinidine sulfate) had the effects of their drugs increase and needed to be switched to a lower dose (whereas other drugs like the psychiatric ones of the era were never potentiated).

• When Merck conducted DMSO clinical trials in 1965, they reported the two primary issues were alcohol and barbiturates becoming potentiated (e.g., suggesting benzodiazepines might be as well). In a few cases, this resulted in people who drank cocktails after becoming extremely drunk.

• Studies in humans and animals (detailed here) showed that DMSO accelerated the elimination of alcohol by 16.67%-28.33%, increased the lethality of alcohol to animals (particularly if DMSO was taken an hour before alcohol) and significantly increased both the cognitive impairment and reduced nerve conduction seen with alcohol consumption.

• DMSO has been observed to enhance the potency of certain opioids (e.g., morphine patches), NSAIDs, Novalgin, anticonvulsants (e.g., gabapentin), sedatives (e.g., trazodone), corticosteroids, gold salts, insulin, barbiturates, and antibiotics—which in many cases can be extremely advantageous.
Note: insulin potentiation is hypothesized to result from DMSO’s protein refolding capacity restoring the functionality of the body’s insulin receptors.

• DMSO has been observed to reverse the effects of Botox (which is a toxin that paralyzes muscles, so by healing that injury, Botox stops “working”).

• DMSO has not been reported to potentiate anticoagulants (e.g., change INR values) as it works through a different pathway to increase circulation and eliminate clots than those drugs do (with aspirin being the one exception, as numerous users have reported they could lower their dose). That said, the possibility of potentiation is there, so I believe it is important to monitor your coagulation values while on the drugs to ensure you are not being excessively anticoagulated.
Note: the only signs I’ve seen arguing the opposite are that I’ve had two or three readers report they began having nose bleeds after starting DMSO.

•In a sample of roughly 10,000 people receiving antibiotics and DMSO concurrently, 4 reported experiencing significant reactions from the drugs that typically are very rare, suggesting a potentiation of toxicity occurred, which I believe followed either a fluoroquinolone, sulfonamide or macrolide, with the most severe following a fluoroquinolone (while in contrast DMSO did not potentiate other toxic antibiotics like dioxidine). Likewise, while DMSO typically improves chemotherapy, there have been a few reports of rare but significant side effects sometimes seen with chemotherapy drugs in individuals taking both concurrently.
Note: some of these reactions included circulatory problems/dizziness, generalized allergies, and hematomas.

For this reason, with more toxic drugs (applying abundance of caution), some advise spacing them out at least 2 days from DMSO.
Note: in some of these instances, the patient did not disclose to the DMSO providing doctor that they were on those other drugs, which illustrates why it’s important to make sure everyone has a clear understanding of what else is in the picture.

• A few compounds have been shown to become more toxic with DMSO (e.g., mice and rats given quaternary ammonium salts showed increased toxicity when pentolinium tartrate and hexamethonium bitartrate were dissolved in DMSO, but not when given alone, and DMSO also increased the lethality of benzene), while in contrast other toxic substances (e.g., decamethonium iodide) became less toxic with DMSO.

•Other non-pharmaceutical interactions can also occur. For example, DMSO neutralizes chlorine in drinking water (reducing it to chloride) providing an emergency way to “purify” chlorinated water.

Carrying Size

Many of the bacteria in your mouth are highly pathogenic. Nonetheless, (to the best of my knowledge), no one has gotten sepsis from putting DMSO into their mouth. This is because while DMSO (a very small molecule) is extremely effective at transporting things inside the body, as things get larger, DMSO can no longer transport them, and even the smallest viruses are far larger than DMSO’s maximum carrying size.
Note: while bacteria cannot be transported by DMSO, a theoretical risk exists for the smaller toxins some produce.

Much of this was originally learned after the discovers of DMSO realized a non-injectable way to administer insulin would be extremely helpful for diabetic patients, but regrettably discovered this didn’t work as insulin (a peptide) was too large to enter the body with DMSO. In contrast, most natural chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs are within DMSO’s size limit and hence can be absorbed.

Note: DMSO’s ability to function as a vehicle increases with increasing DMSO concentrations, but in some cases, 90% DMSO is a more effective carrier than 100% DMSO.

As best as I could tell, the exact skin carrying limit of DMSO has not been definitively studied, and most current sources agree it transports substances less than 500 Daltons (Da), and may to a lesser degree transport those between 500-1000 Daltons (whereas insulin is 5808 Da).
Note: one study sensitized participants to injected allergens and then tested whether topical DMSO mixed with the allergen could elicit the same reaction. They found that penicillin consistently elicited a reaction, while castor beans induced a small reaction, while cotton seeds, celery, and buckwheat did not. This suggests a small degree of penetration of roughly 10,000 Da substances with DMSO. In the case of vaccines (which need larger biomolecules to enter the body), I’ve seen conflicting data (e.g., one study showed DMSO made it possible to deliver a plasmid based vaccine through the skin, while many others showed it interfered with the oral typhoid vaccine).

I suspect the actual limit is higher, as I’ve seen many cases of larger drugs that are clearly being transported (e.g., ivermectin is 875 Da). Stanley Jacob found that DMSO significantly increased the penetration of heparin into dog urinary bladders.1,2,3 Likewise, many studies have found a DMSO-heparin gel was therapeutically active in patients.

Heparin for context has a molecular weight of 2,000-30,000 Da (typically averaging 12,000-15,000 Da or 4,000-6,000 Da for low weight formulations), greatly exceeding the 500 Da threshold, suggesting either that the 500Da limit is wrong, that all of those studies and outsiders investigating them made an erroneous conclusion (e.g., benefits attributed to DMSO-Heparin were just due to DMSO), or that heparin being extremely electronegative increases DMSO’s ability to transport it.

Note: a Dalton is equal to the mass of a Hydrogen atom, so a strand of human DNA is approximately 2,080,000,000,000 Da, whereas aspirin is 180.16 Da and prednisone is 358.43 Da.

Lastly, that limit (which is not constrained by the skin) appears to be much higher inside the body. For example, there is some evidence suggesting DMSO can bring molecules larger than 70,000 Da through the blood-brain barrier (suggesting an even wider range of possibilities for DMSO IV mixtures).

Read the Whole Article

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Of course, you must expect a whole lot of deranged thinking after the USA’s Saturday night “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB) attack on Iran’s three nuke sites — because derangement drives the spirit of our time in Western Civ. France, Germany, the UK, Sweden still can’t wrap their brains around the jihad they have fecklessly invited inside their countries — and they prosecute anyone who suggests as much.

Over here, the Oregon state legislature brought in drag-queens to entertain members in the chamber . . .California taxpayers subsidize the riots in LA . . . a federal judge orders Kilmar Abrego Garcia released from custody . . . AOC endorses a Muslim lunatic for mayor in New York. . . . So it goes.

For all that, often the simplest explanation is the correct one. Of the MOAB attack on Iran, Secretary of State Rubio said, “They had all the pieces in place to have a nuclear weapon. . . now, not so much.” Mr. Rubio’s Sunday chat with Maria Bartiromo is well worth a listen for clarity. He also succinctly stated, “They [Iran] are the sole source of instability in the entire Middle East, and the world has been paying a price for this for forty-something years.”

Yet, the American hive-mind is aflame with histrionic hypotheticals over Iran, driven by the same prevailing anxiety that infects the illegal alien issue, lawfare, sexual insanity, our role in the Ukraine fiasco. The leitmotif lately is the popular idea that Israel controls the US like a puppeteer and that the Jews are out to rule the world. Yes, the shrill charge of “Zionism” boils down to that. (Just look at the comment section of this blog.)

There is, necessarily, uncertainty about the result of our MOAB strikes. We will not be sending troops in to inspect Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. Iran had time, while jerking-around American diplomats, to move its stockpile of 60-percent enriched uranium (if that’s what it was). But they no longer have the facilities to do anything with it, or the top scientists to run the program, and if they attempt to restart all of that, the US will have the option to take them out again. So, you can stop the handwringing over that.

Another popular rumor in circulation is that the MOAB mission was a charade, just a show that Mr. Trump put on to satisfy his ego. That assumes everybody in the chain-of-command was duped, a low-percentage supposition. How is it unclear that the president is not messing around? The main message is “No nukes for Iran.” There was, apparently, some part of that simple proposition the mullahs did not understand. Perhaps the Iranian people understand that the mullahs are not fit to govern their country. It looks like we’ll find out soon enough.

Meanwhile propaganda-central keeps trying to steer the hive-mind back onto RussiaRussiaRussia, and onto Mr. Putin especially. CBS’s 60 Minutes re-worked an old segment last night on Putin opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison last year at 47 under curious circumstances. I doubt we know the whole story, and CBS surely did not try to present it. But the main purpose was to call Mr. Putin names — thief, murderer, tyrant — and the reason for that was also clear and simple: to derail Mr. Trump’s efforts to normalize relations with Russia.

That effort is a cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s campaign to re-arrange trade relations in such a way that our country can become productive again, employing its citizens in a purposeful way. It happens to imply an end to the Ukraine war, which the Obama State Department and the CIA set the groundwork for in 2014. Ending this war is not in the interest of a certain Beltway blob that thrives on creaming-off the weapons industry. Their schemes require Russia to remain an enemy of the US, a wholly engineered idiocy that media outfits like CBS promote.

Viewed through a wider lens, the MOAB mission was also intended as a message to China. It is a simple and straightforward message: Expect that Mr. Trump means what he says when he says it. He is not messing around. China has been messing around with us to a stunning degree, especially during the past four years of the phantom president “Joe Biden.” China has infiltrated every critical corner of American life: our government, our universities, our medical research, our computer tech sector, our finances, Hollywood, our news media, our critical infrastructure, you name it.

China has been waging war on us in every way except troops and kinetics. Mr. Trump seeks to end all these operations, without coming to blows. That is, he is trying to find a path to what used to be quaintly called peaceful coexistence. If there’s a reason that the political Left in America can’t get behind that simple idea, it might be because the CCP is too deeply mixed up in Democratic Party politics. Their intentions intersect: to bring chaos to America.

Earlier today (Monday), Iran sent another salvo of missiles into Israel at civilian targets, and Israel answered with its own salvo aimed at Iran’s government offices in Teheran. Many expect some sort of retaliation by Iran against the US, either at our bases around the Middle East and Mediterranean, or here in the homeland. You can’t doubt that Iran managed to sneak in many hundreds of capable saboteurs during the “Joe Biden” open border fiesta. Why wouldn’t they seize the opportunity? (Or China, too.)

There’s also the usual talk about Iran shutting down the Straits of Hormuz, through which roughly 20-percent of the world’s oil supply passes — and much of that (up to 45-percent) goes directly to China, which does not have enough of its own oil to function. So, blocking Hormuz would mainly harm Iran’s fellow BRICs nations in Asia while it would deprive Iran of the oil revenue that represents most of its national income. In other words, a really stupid play.

Otherwise, the Trump government looks to exit its role in the Iran-Israeli war. The chief aim has been accomplished. No nukes. Iran’s usual henchmen, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, are standing down for the moment, probably perceiving that Iran can no longer support, supply, or protect them. Israel is managing to do what it did in two earlier wars (despite doomish predications): prevail against its enemy. And rather quickly, too. Wouldn’t it amazing if the Middle East happened to become a little peaceful for a while?

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Boom appeared first on LewRockwell.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein has drawn attention to an overlooked remark made by State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce last month saying that the United States is “the greatest country on earth, next to Israel.”

“The pride of being able to be here and do work that facilitates making things better for people and in the greatest country on Earth, next to Israel,” Bruce told Jewish News Syndicate. “It’s an honor to be able to make a difference and to be able to speak in this regard with an administration that I love so much and that I feel genuinely represented by.”

It’s like this administration is doing everything it can to vindicate those who accuse it of being Israel First instead of America First.

❖

I feel like we don’t talk enough about the fact that Donald Trump publicly admitted to being bought and owned by the richest Israeli on earth, Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson.

On the campaign trail last year Trump told the Israeli American Council Summit that the first time he was president, Miriam and her late husband Sheldon “would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody, outside of people that work there.” He said they were always after something, “always for Israel,” and “as soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else.” He named the US recognition of the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel as one of the gifts he showered the Zionist state with to please the Adelsons, who pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into his presidential campaigns.

❖

It’s hard to focus on Israel’s airstrikes in Lebanon due to Israel’s invasion of Syria, which is hard to focus on due to Israel’s atrocities in the West Bank, which are hard to focus on due to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which is hard to focus on due to Israel’s war on Iran, which is hard to focus on because of America’s war on Iran.

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Top Ten dumbest things we’re being asked to believe about Iran:

1. That the Iranians want to be bombed.

2. That the guy bombing Iran wants peace.

3. That regime change interventionism is a swell idea this time.

4. That anyone who doesn’t want war with Iran hates Jews.

5. That this time the government and the media are telling us the truth about an American war.

6. That this time the neocons are smart and correct.

7. That bombing Iran makes it LESS likely to try to obtain nukes.

8. That Iran is trying to assassinate the US president when all US presidents have the same foreign policy.

9. That Iran (a country that never starts wars) cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, but Israel (a country that starts wars constantly) can.

10. That attacking Iran benefits Americans.

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It blows my mind that there are people trying to argue that Trump does not seek war. What do these idiots think the United States would do if another country started bombing American energy infrastructure?

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I’m trying to get an important business deal done, so I firebombed the guy’s house to make him more likely to negotiate with me. I just want peace.

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The following things are antisemitic:

– opposing war with Iran

– viewing Palestinians as human

– opposing genocide

– Greta Thunberg

– peace

– journalism

– Ms Rachel

– truth

– critical thinking

– the UN

– Tucker Carlson

– Amnesty International

– Human Rights Watch

– equal rights

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It’s hilarious that anyone still takes this “antisemitism” schtick seriously. Oh no there’s a special group of white people who might get hurt feelings if I don’t want to send my kids to invade Iran.

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The western world has been on a two-year crash course learning all the reasons why the Muslim world has been correct about Israel this entire time.

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It’s kind of nice to be arguing with George W Bush conservatives about US foreign policy again. For the last few years I’ve been getting called a Nazi by western Zionists and a Putin-loving fascist by NATO simps; it’s refreshing to be hated for the hippie moonbat I actually am for once.

______________

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The post US State Department Spokeswoman Says Israel Is Greater Than America appeared first on LewRockwell.

The recklessness increases. President Trump committed an act of war for Israel.  This comes on top of some fool green-lighting an attack on the Russian strategic triad, an attack that was played down even by Putin himself.  What will Washington’s next reckless act be?

Why did Putin green-light the attack on Iran by conveniently announcing that Russia’s treaty with Iran did not include military support, a claim that John Helmer says is disproved by secret provisions in the treaty?

Russia and China could have prevented the attack, but did nothing.  Peace in the Middle East could have been established with a Russian-Iranian-Chinese mutual security treaty.  Why do Russia and China prefer war to peace in the Middle East?  Where was Iran’s air defense?  Why is Iran always a sitting duck devoid of initiative?  Why are Muslims happy fighting one another instead of their real enemies?

Israel and Israel’s Western puppets have turned war into an ongoing activity that does not need declaration.  For Israel’s reasons, not for America’s, President trump has militarily attacked a regional military power without Congress’ declaration of war as required by the US Constitution. Clearly, war has prevailed over the Constitution. This began with Bill Clinton’s presidency, and expanded with subsequent presidents.  Israel has obtained the power where Israel can send America to war and we hapless Americans can do nothing about it.

Israel has undeclared nuclear weapons but can have Trump attack Iran’s peaceful use of atomic power.  Israel can exterminate Palestinians and obliterate Gaza, without effective protest from any country.  But Iran is evil and against America if Iran stands up for itself.  Thanks to the US media and Israel’s bought-and-paid-for US Congress, many years of Israeli propaganda against Iran has been driven into the heads of the American public, which will simply accept another of their country’s acts of aggression against “Muslim terrorists” and “weapons of mass destruction.”

Perhaps the saddest part of this is it demonstrates once again that elections cannot change anything.  America cannot be made great again without a new political party led by people independent of Israel and the corrupt American Establishment.  These people would have to avoid being assassinated or arrested and prosecuted by the American Establishment.  This would require militant supporters willing and able to use violence.  Who is there to lead such a movement?  The American Establishment will not permit any such force to appear. The American Establishment would not even permit Americans to protest a stolen presidential election.

Conspiracy theorists will see in Russia and China’s inaction their involvement in a globalist plot against any form of independence. How do we know they are not right?  What else explains the world sitting on its butt while Israel commits genocide of Palestine, and Washington, without a declaration of war, overthrows 5 countries, and is now working on a sixth, for Israel.  The seventh on the list is Saudi Arabia, and Netanyahu recently added Pakistan as the eighth.  Turkey will be the ninth. The extraordinary aggression that Washington and Israel have unleashed on the world seems never ending.   Putin and Xi seem to think that Russia and China can sit them out, but Russia and China are the two main targets.  While Russia and China sit on their butts, they are being isolated from allies such as Iran and from one another.

Trump had just given Iran two weeks to come to terms with his demands, and then launched a surprise attack the next day.  After such treachery, how can Putin possibly return to “peace negotiations?”  As Putin is so averse to acknowledging reality that he dismisses Washington’s attack on Russia’s nuclear triad as “an act of terrorism, not of war,” what will Washington’s next attack on Russia be?  What is  Xi going to do when he finds he cannot wait out his adversary?

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with the sword, and with hunger — Revelation 6:8

The post The Horsemen of the Apocalypse appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ten days ago a sudden surprise Israeli attack inflicted a terrible, decapitating blow upon the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, successfully assassinating the country’s top military commanders, its chief nuclear weapons negotiator, and nearly all of its most prominent nuclear scientists. Many of these victims were killed in their own homes together with their family members by explosive drones or missile strikes that sometimes destroyed entire apartment buildings, causing many collateral civilian deaths.

No such sudden massive wave of public assassinations against the top leadership of a major nation had ever previously happened, and the resulting war with its salvos of retaliatory Iranian missiles against Israel has now also brought America into the conflict.

Among other things, these events conclusively demonstrated the near-total control that Israel and its political partisans have achieved over the entire Western global media. Iran was in the midst of ongoing negotiations with the Trump Administration over its nuclear program, so Israel’s sudden strike was obviously an unprovoked attack, totally violating all international laws. Similarly, the assassination of so many of Iran’s military leaders and civilian scientists also broke every existing rule of international warfare. If any other country in the world had committed even a small fraction of these crimes, it would have been universally condemned in the strongest possible terms by every international body and subjected to the harshest international sanctions, quite possibility including coordinated military action to remove its regime and bring its political leadership to trial.

But since Israel’s fervent supporters completely dominate the global media, they can easily transform black into white and up into down. Thus, the bizarre result of this illegal, unprovoked Israeli attack upon Iran was a wave of public statements strongly sympathetic to Israel made by European and American political leaders from President Donald Trump on down, thereby demonstrating that all these powerful, once independent nations had merely become subservient vassals to the Jewish State.

Last year, I noted that more than a half-century ago something similar had happened in the aftermath of the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty:

I’ve often suggested that our media functions as a powerful tool of mind-control, not too dissimilar from what might be found in the plotlines of classic science fiction. After spending weeks or months immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. For most individuals, the whisper in the back of their skulls overwhelms their logical reasoning, while their emotional reactions are turned on or off as if by a switch.

A perfect example of this came in the infamous U.S.S. Liberty incident of 1967. While peacefully sailing in international waters, our naval vessel was attacked by the Israelis, whose air and sea forces killed or wounded more than 200 American servicemen, and only by chance failed in their effort to sink the ship with no survivors. This constituted America’s worst naval loss of life at enemy hands since the huge sea battles of World War II, and surely if any other nation in the world had been responsible, our swift and overwhelming military retaliation would have bombed its major cities to rubble and killed many thousands of its citizens, while perhaps also hunting down and executing all the enemy leaders who had ordered that unprovoked attack.

But instead our government completely covered up that incident at the time it occurred, and the only consequence was that the annual financial tribute we paid to the Jewish State steadily increased in size. Even when the facts finally came out a dozen years later, any outrage was confined to just a small sliver of our population, while the majority who heard the story vaguely assumed that since the media told them “nothing to see here” they should move on and pay no attention. Something that under normal circumstances might have been expected to provoke a major punitive war merely produced a few uncomfortable shrugs.

Given its large size and advanced weaponry, America stood as a physical colossus on the world stage of the 1960s, with no other country able to directly challenge our might. But we were still helpless before the nation that had attacked us because the small pro-Israel Jewish minority deployed its tools of media mind-control to transform us into powerless marionettes, jerked about by invisible strings.

Another important conclusion to be drawn from these recent developments is that the Jewish State has certainly now established itself as history’s most prolific and skillful practitioner of assassinations as a technique of statecraft, having easily surpassed the notorious exploits of that small band of heretical Muslims who terrorized Middle Eastern leaders a thousand years ago and gave their name to that lethal tactic. Any introductory history books that describe the famed Order of Assassins as the foremost employers of that craft should therefore be revised.

Although political assassinations have hardly been uncommon throughout recorded history, during the last several centuries major Western nations had almost entirely abandoned such methods, rejecting them as immoral and illegal.

For example, historian David Irving revealed that when one of Adolf Hitler’s aides suggested to him that an attempt be made to assassinate the Soviet military leadership during the bitter combat on the Eastern Front of World War II, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade any such practices as obvious violations of the laws of civilized warfare.

In a long January 2020 article, I described this traditional Western attitude, and then explained that over the last couple of decades the combination of our “War on Terror” and growing Neocon influence had dramatically changed that policy.

The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.

A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don’t recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means…

During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged as rebels by the British. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin’s blade, nor that King George III ever considered using such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation’s history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln’s death being one of the very few that comes to mind.

At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents—Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—all issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.

Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:

One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.

Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but

Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.

We don’t call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are “targeted killings,” most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America’s go-to weapon in the war on terror.

My article quoting Pollock primarily focused on the long history of Israeli Mossad operations, and although I drew my material from some seventeen different books, the centerpiece of my discussion was Ronen Bergman’s magisterial 2018 volume on that subject. I would strongly recommend that work as the single best starting point for gaining an understanding of Israel’s policy of assassinations and other lethal covert activity.

The book reviewed by Pollack was Rise and Kill First by New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman, a weighty study of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, together with its sister agencies. The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel’s long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.

That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman’s volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as “hands down” the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory…

The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book.

As I emphasized last week, over the past seven years I have published a long list of articles presenting the overwhelming evidence pointing to Israel and its Mossad as playing the central role in both the assassinations of the Kennedys and the 9/11 terrorist attacks against our country. All my major factual claims in those articles have been carefully analyzed by Deep Research, the most powerful AI available, and they have been judged completely accurate. Those interested in the matter should read some of those articles and the corresponding AI fact-checking reports and decide for themselves:

• How Israel Killed the Kennedys
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 24, 2025 • 11,500 Words
  Fact-Checking “How Israel Killed the Kennedys”• 15,300 Words

• American Pravda: Remembering the 9/11 Truth Movement
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 11, 2023 • 9,800 Words
  Fact-Checking “American Pravda: Remembering the 9/11 Truth Movement” • 21,700 Words

However, even if none of this accumulated evidence implicating Israel existed, I think that anyone carefully reading the Bergman book with an open mind would quickly come to a rather similar conclusion. Bergman’s text provides not the slightest hint of any Mossad role in those infamous attacks against our own country and its national leadership, but he does describe some strikingly parallel incidents.

Read the Whole Article

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For the U.S. to take military action against Iran, it is almost like the University of Tennessee football team taking on a little boys team from the Pee Wee league.

Iran’s total military budget was only a little over two percent of the U.S. military budget, and that was before Israel started dropping bombs there and killing Iran’s top eight Generals and its nine leading nuclear scientists.

Iran had made no credible military threat against the U.S. and was not even capable of attacking us in any significant way if they had.

We should not have allowed Netanyahu to lead us into another unnecessary war in the Middle East as he did in Iraq. The world renowned foreign policy expert, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, called Netanyahu the “main cheerleader” for the Iraq War and described him as “one of the most violent and dangerous people in the world.”

Even before we jumped in, Israel was already winning its war and had achieved total air superiority by wiping out Iran’s air defense capabilities.

Thankfully, our pilots and crew members were in no danger and were simply following orders, but they were dropping bombs that were not needed and should not have been dropped in the first place.

Netanyahu had been crying wolf for 30 years falsely claiming over and over that Iran was just weeks or months away from developing a nuclear bomb. This claim had been debunked by several different intelligence officials over the years, including by Tulsi Gabbard as recently as March 25.

Israel has refused to join the International Atomic Energy Agency like all other countries with nuclear power except North Korea. It also has refused to disclose the number of nuclear warheads it has, but most estimates are 300 or more. This gives Israel overwhelming nuclear superiority in the Middle East.

The only reason it needs to have the U.S. in this war is for public relations purposes. Almost every nation except the U.S.has harshly condemned Israel for its extreme and excessive cruelty in killing and starving so many thousands of women and children in Gaza.

Sen. Charles Schumer said in a Senate speech on March 14, 2024 that Netanyahu had become “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows”, and he added “Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”

Israel’s unnecessary war in Iran might possibly have been the last straw, the final step in making it a worldwide pariah for sure if the U.S. had not joined the war.

Unfortunately, almost every President since World War Two, with the exception of Eisenhower, has seemed to want to be seen as a new Winston Churchill. They and their closest advisors  seem to get excited and feel very powerful and important if they can go to dramatic late night meetings in a White House war room and put this Country into another war.

The head of the U.S. Military Central Command, Gen. Michael Kurilla, nicknamed “The Gorilla” and described as “Israel’s favorite General”, an d Gen. Dan ‘Razin’ Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been pushing for U.S. involvement. Also egging the war effort on have been the Senate’s two leading “bomb everybody” hawks, Sen. Lindsay Graham and Sen. Tom Cotton.

This war has already cost our taxpayers many billions in all the weapons and equipment we have sent to Israel in addition to the planes, bombs , missiles, warships, troops and equipment we have moved into the region. Earlier we spent about two billion and lost two jets in bombing Yemen at Israel’s request.

President Trump was elected in large part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq and because he said he wanted to put America First. The war in Iran is not our war. It is putting Israel First.

In his Inaugural Address. President Trump said: “We will measure our success not only by little battles we win, but also by the wars that end, and perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, THE WARS WE NEVER GET INTO.” (my emphasis) Where is that man today?

In his speech in Riyadh, he said the marvels of the Middle East were “not created by the so-called ‘nation builders’, neocons, or liberal non-profits….”. He said “the so-called nation builders wrecked far more than they ever built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” Where is this man now?

By intervening in this latest war, we are bowing to the wishes of the neocons who have already cost this Nation the lives of thousands of young Americans and trillions of dollars.

Even if this intervention against a very weak Iran ends quickly, it still sets a very bad precedent and sends us down the wrong path to follow for a Nation whose rank and file want peace, not unnecessary war. And the neocons said the Iraq War would be a “cakewalk.”

I wish President Trump would be more like President Eisenhower.  In 1956, Eisenhower not only resisted tremendous pressure from Israel to join it in a war against Egypt, he did it on national television one week before the presidential election.

Mitchell Bard wrote in The Times of Israel in 2014: “Eisenhower went on television to criticize Israel’s failure to withdraw from Egypt and warned he would impose sanctions if it failed to comply. Eisenhower was prepared to cut off all economic aid, to lift the tax-exempt status of the United Jewish Appeal, and to apply sanctions on Israel.”

Trump said on Feb. 13 that he wanted to cut the military budget in half. Now, he is pushing his”Big Beautiful Bill” which would increase defense spending by $150 billion to over one trillion a year.

In Evan Thomas’s book on Eisenhower’s foreign policy,  “Ike’s Bluff”, it says: “When Defense Secretary Neil McElroy warned him that further cuts would harm national security, Eisenhower acerbically replied, ‘If you go to any military installation in the world where the American flag is flying and tell the commander that Ike says he will give him an extra star for his shoulder if he cuts his budget, there’ll be such a rush to cut his budget you’ll have to get out of the way.”

Eisenhower also told his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster “God help the Nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.”

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When the warden doesn’t like the way the Paul Newman character talks to him, he beats him, then proceeds to project his own weakness and insecurity in the famous ‘failure to communicate” speech. Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 anthem to the resistance of prisoners to the moral inferiors who hold near complete power over their lives.

Americans today are living this movie – we are prisoners and Washington, DC is “led” by a lecturing “Captain” and, behind him, the men with no eyes.  It’s not just Tom Woods’ Rule #3,  that “no matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.” It’s that the US empire has a new down-home warden telling the story, backed by tall men in mirrored sunglasses who monitor obedience and create constant fear, at home and abroad.  That’s the plot, anyway.

Instead of the anti-establishment films of the 60s and 70s like Cool Hand Luke and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we have slick propaganda films like Top Gun: Maverick.  The latter generated Western expectation and applause for exactly what happened on June 22, an unlawful, unwarranted, and extremely destabilizing attack on the nuclear energy capabilities of a country simply because of “our ally.”  Mike Benz gives a great summary of the movie plot, and how it worked to suppress criticism and generate Pavlovian applause on a national scale.

In that movie, it all worked out great.  The Tom Cruise character appears “anti-establishment.” Literally call-sign Maverick, he channels our instinctive and well-warranted distrust of senior flag officers, politicians and bureaucrats – while actually serving a militaristic unipolar global vision.  It ventures into state sacrilege only in illustrating the speed and apparent maintainability of the Iranian F-14 Tomcats, a side-eye to what we get today from the MIC, the disastrously precious F-35 being a prime example.   We are talking about the F-14s the US sold to the Shah after the CIA emplaced him in Tehran during the last Washington-driven Iranian regime change in 1953.   But the movie didn’t go into those details, and was not intended to explore those consequences.  CIA-pedia provides extensive information on what would be the first major foreign policy/CIA decision of the Eisenhower presidency.

In light of the recent Tucker Carlson interview with once and future presidential aspirant Ted Cruz, one imagines that few in the current Executive or Legislative branches know much about Iran, other than “knowing” it’s a country with oil that they wish to control, to leverage, to order around and put in leg-irons.

Just like Mossad exploding pagers, and MI-6/CIA/Ukrainian/Mossad truck borne drones laying in wait to attack Russia’s nuclear triad, we see after the US performative attack on the nuclear capability at Fordow, the perpetrators cannot help bragging after the fact on how sly and devious they were, and for this we should be grateful. Lying heads of state, who boast about their terror tactics serve two key purposes:  First, they instruct foe and friend alike in the ease and usefulness of terrorism, ensuring both defensive preparation and creative emulation against the state; and second they reveal intrinsic command weakness and treachery of the state vis a vis its own population. In an era where almost all commercial technology is heavily state-subsidized, we hold in our hands and homes and vehicles a little piece of the untrustworthy and fundamentally evil state. How many people looked at their cell phones differently after the Israel pager attack?  How many began to wonder what is actually inside the trucks and cargo containers scattered in every part of our country?  The use of US submarines to fire nuclear capable Tomahawk missiles suddenly and silently on the “Captain”’s command is a reminder of our own vulnerability to attack by our own state, its allies or its adversaries, if those states deem it “necessary.”

It’s always good to see the true nature of the state, and while it isn’t filled with lizard people, it is indeed and undeniably morally alien to humanity.  One current example is Gaza, demonstrating the law of state paralysis, and the lack of state purpose, and most importantly, the lack of desire, to stop the nuclear-level destruction of the Gaza Strip, or to even ameliorate the Western starvation of two million Gazans.

Many already know this, and many more sense it.  Turns out Brian Berletic was always right – it’s not ideologies or religions, -isms or schisms, it is that the state operates not only openly, but solely on the plane of power and profit.

It’s important to note that the boomers watched Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in their formative years. They also benefitted from an array of novels and movies written and made about the evil of imperial warfare in the aftermath of Vietnam.  They have benefitted from the revisionist history of our American way of war, and the US federal state.  They celebrated the power of individuals to act morally and courageously in the face of the concentrated power. Sadly, it seems that many of them only absorbed one lesson:  In the end, it didn’t turn out well for Lucas Jackson and Randall McMurphy.

Those same boomers, and subsequent American generations, clap and whoop for Maverick, as the independent and moral daredevil complies and subsumes his extraordinary skillset for the state, with the obligatory sarcasm or throwaway dry comebacks to the men without eyes.  To be fair, the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible series increasingly and correctly conflates the “power and profit” state with great evil, gangs writ large, and men without eyes or morals.  But state backed infotainment – even if it feels like it is opposed to tyranny and tyrants – is no substitute for simple reflection on our own moral sensibility, our own perspectives on how we can, and must, increase and expand human liberty.

You can’t fix stupid.  And yet, we don’t have to consume it, cheer it, accept it, tolerate it, obey it, worship it, support it, fund it, or justify it.  We ought only to study it, scientifically and when we do, we may find ourselves in agreement with former Russian President Medvedev, who frequently observes that state leaders – and the states they protect – are fundamentally similar to parasitic worms, blood-sucking ticks, and vermin.  Let there be no failure to communicate this truth, in every way to everyone.  Thank you for your attention to this matter!

The post What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the 21st of June, a day that will live in infamy, President Trump led the American People to War with Iran. Trump’s message to Americans? Striking Iran’s three nuclear facilities is all that U.S. Forces will do. Unless, of course, the Iranians have the temerity to strike back. In that case Trump promises to destroy Iran. Ridiculous.

Washington has launched its own Pearl Harbor operation.  U.S. Air and Naval Power executed rehearsed strikes against a few “critical” Iranian targets. Then, American Forces pulled back, ostensibly waiting for Tehran to capitulate much like the Japanese in December 1941. Trump’s mindset echoes Israel’s thinking when it attacked Iran last week, but Iran did not collapse after Israel’s surprise attack.

And Tehran won’t capitulate to Washington’s opening moves. Initial assessments of the strikes’ effectiveness suggest nothing of consequence was destroyed. The facilities? Devoid of people. Empty of centrifuges and enriched uranium.  But the lack of damage? That’s not yet relevant. It’s a question no one in Washington cares to answer.

The world now waits for Iran’s response. Tehran’s leaders aren’t reckless or impetuous. Their counter-strike will be deliberate and likely decisive. And make no mistake, Iran will strike back. It will do so in ways Washington doesn’t expect.

Why? Tehran controls the political and moral high ground. Israel violated international law. A program of mass murder in Gaza. Backing the murderous ISIS-led regime in Syria. Killing Christians. Killing other minorities. Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran. These are incontrovertible facts.

Escalation is inevitable, but Iran, not Washington, will control it. Remember the Houthis from Yemen and their war with Saudi Arabia? They struck Saudi oil fields. Repeatedly. Now, Iran has far greater reach. Far more ballistic missiles. Desalination plants. Across the Arabian Gulf are within striking distance of the Houthis. They are also within striking range of Iranian missiles. Millions depend on them for water.

Iran’s parliament just voted to close the Strait of Hormuz. Markets won’t react until Monday morning. But they will panic. Inevitably, oil prices will soar. The financial consequences for Americans? Eventually, devastating. Everyday, one out of every five barrels of oil  flows through the Straits of Hormuz.

Washington spent six months bombing the Houthis. Then, Washington threw in the towel. Walking away from war with Iran won’t be so easy.

Russian Prime Minister Medvedev warned that many countries are now willing to transfer nuclear technology to Iran. Simple rule. Countries with nuclear weapons don’t get bombed. Look at North Korea. Countries without them? They get bombed. Iraq. Libya and, now, Iran prove it. This is the universal lesson for the world beyond America’s borders.

Iran’s parliament voted to close the Straits of Hormuz, but Tehran doesn’t need to formally close the Strait of Hormuz. Shipping companies will do it. If the risk of losing tankers is too great, the insurance companies will insist. The world’s oil supply will slow and the impact on industries that depend on petroleum products will be disastrous.

This is the real “battle damage assessment.” The consequences will be felt for decades. Trump just invited war to America. Now, Americans must prepare for it. Tens of millions of foreigners crossed our borders illegally between  2020 and 2025. Washington is foolish to ignore the high probability that Islamist terror sleeper cells are here. No doubt, the Drug Cartels will be happy to cooperate with them against American Law Enforcement.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Pastor who resisted Hitler’s regime and was eventually executed by the Nazis, said evil carries the germ of its own subversion. But against stupidity, Bonhoeffer warned the well-intentioned are always defenseless.

Bonhoeffer explained why: “Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplishes anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”

Washington’s ruling political class, not just President Trump, decided to unconditionally support Israel in its war against Iran. Going to war when and where Israel dictates and for reasons Israel decrees is stupid. It’s worse than stupid. It’s stupidity on stilts. Israel’s war for Jewish Supremacy in the Middle East will fail and Washington will now fail with it.  The war against Iran will fail because the war is unjust and the world will ensure that it fails.

Reprinted with Author’s permission from X.

The post A Day That Will Live in Infamy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Just a few weeks ago in this space I urged President Trump to accept a deal with Iran allowing it to continue pursuing civilian nuclear power while ensuring that it would not pursue nuclear weapons. Iran signaled it was ready to sign such a deal, yet suddenly Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff changed the US position to demand no civilian nuclear enrichment at all.

The US Administration understood that Iran could not accept such a demand – that it had that right as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty – but Witkoff shifted the position anyway. Just days before the sixth round of negotiations were to take place, Israel blew up the whole process by launching a surprise attack on Iran and here we are just over a week later staring right into the face of World War III.

Had the “bait and switch” and subsequent Israeli attack not taken place, we likely would be seeing rapidly improving trade relations with Iran and throughout the region that would have enriched all parties. Peace and prosperity. It would have been a “win-win” for everyone.

But the neocons and their leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, couldn’t stand the prospect of peace breaking out in the region so they dusted off their old lies about “weapons of mass destruction” from the lead up to the Iraq war and soon enough the talks were sunk beneath a barrage of Israeli – and as of this past weekend American – bombs and missiles.

President Trump’s decision to spend untold billions of dollars on what appears to be not much more than a “symbolic” bombing of Iran’s already-vacated nuclear facilities was no doubt made with the intention of making himself look tough. Unfortunately for him, it has had the opposite effect.

He has shown the world that he was no more able to resist the demands of the neocons and warmongers than his predecessors, and in abandoning his promises to be the president that ends wars instead of starting new ones he has also abandoned the most enthusiastic part of his base.

What President Trump does not seem to understand is that true strength is not measured in how many missiles you can send to the “Hitler of the month” as designated by the warmongers. True strength comes from standing up for your stated principles in the face of the enormous pressure that will inevitably be placed on you.

Real strength is strength of character. It often comes from the ability to say “no” when everyone around you demands that you give up a little bit of your principles for promises of riches or glory.

As of this writing, we are standing on the precipice of a major war in the Middle East that threatens to bring in much larger actors such as Russia and China. The neocons, filled with unwarranted vainglory, welcome such a clash because they won’t be doing the fighting and dying. They will be the ones reaping the financial and other rewards. As usual.

Unfortunately, President Trump has severely damaged his credibility by embroiling us in a war that is not our war. He would do well to immediately change course, search for off-ramps, make peace with Iran, and once and for all banish all neocons and warmongers from anywhere near his Administration. Otherwise “MAGA” will go down in history as nothing but a cruel joke.

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Select Background Resources on Israel and the Middle East

The study of the construction of pseudo-secular gnostic religions has been one of the principal obsessions of my life since I first heard Gerhart Niemeyer of Notre Dame lecture on it in 1975 at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Western Summer School at Thomas Aquinas College.

Niemeyer was a keen student of world-renown philosopher Eric Voegelin on these matters, as was Murray Rothbard. I believe understanding this 2000 year battle between orthodox Roman Catholic Christianity and Gnosticism is the ultimate key to unlocking the history of the previous two millennia.

Within the convoluted matrix of this arcane historical wilderness is the search for the ancient origin stories of peoples such as the “Aryans,” “Palestinians” and “the Jews.” Much of this “history” or pseudo-history is very controversial yet intriguing and concerns the ideological roots/origins of Marxism, Fascism, Zionism, National Socialism, Anti-Semitism, Christian Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, Arab Nationalism, and Ba’athism, which continue to impact the geopolitics of the Middle East today.

The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question — Book by Theodor Herzl

The Invention of the Jewish People — Book by Shlomo Sand;

Khazars -Wikipedia

Chazars — The Jewish Encyclopedia

The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage, Book by Arthur Koestler

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East — Book by David Fromkin;

Israel – Birth of a Nation — Documentary

Modern Middle East History in Ten Minutes: Origins of Israel – Palestinian Conflict — Documentary

Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used To Create Israel;

Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism;

Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace?;

Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement — 25th Anniversary Edition: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine;

Saddam and Third Reich –– Documentary (10 parts)

Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators;

Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir;

Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis;

“Ancient History”: U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention — Sheldon L. Richman article

and John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People.

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Tim McGraw wrote:

California politicians and bureaucrats don’t have the business acumen to run a lemonade stand.

The post How Hollywood is Collapsing in Real Time appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

The US government won’t have to contract out its dungeons and torture chambers to other countries anymore (like Tora Prison in Egypt). The US will have its own dungeons and torture (interrogation) rooms in the new Beirut Embassy. The US government is an evil institution full of evil men and women.

The post “What the Hell Is That?” New 5,000 person US Embassy in Beirut,Lebanon appeared first on LewRockwell.

Just months into his second term, “Peace President” Donald Trump has launched missiles into an Iran that has neither attacked nor threatened to attack the United States. And he has done so with virtually no input from the US Congress. What comes next? Former US diplomat and senior US Senate foreign policy analyst Jim Jatras joins today’s Liberty Report.

The post Trump’s War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

The politicians, bureaucrats, spies, and military inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway live in a Fantasyland. The price of oil and doing business is going up.

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