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Writes Bill Madden:

Rising prices are the result of inflation which is caused by increasing the money supply in excess of the goods and services available in the marketplace.  Surplus budgets cause the economy to contract while deficit budgets stimulate economic expansion.  Since we are controlled by very wealthy families owning most of Corporate America’s stock, we have enjoyed mostly deficit budgets since the end of WW II and, as a consequence, the wealthy families have enjoyed healthy quarterly profit distributions.

When we have an economic contraction, many assets like homes, automobiles, etc. are lost to the lenders via bankruptcy on loans created from nothing like our $38 trillion national debt.  It has been alleged that the Great Depression was engineered by the wealthy owners of our country by flooding the economy with easy money during the “roaring twenties” and then tightening the money supply too much too soon resulting in the economy tightening too much.  Whether engineered or not, many people lost many assets on loans created from thin air.

Our Constitution is clear as to whom should control our money (our fiat currency, actually).  Whenever an institution like the Fed owned by people with an interest in free asset accumulation is provided an opportunity to manage anything where mismanagement is far more profitable than good management, the institution will most likely engage in mismanagement.  No matter the true cause of our many problems, the people always pay like in 2008 when we bailed out the gigantic gambling losses incurred by the banking industry.

Please visit: www.shadowstats.com and, under Alternate Data, learn the actual rate of inflation.

See here.

The post Inflation appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/perche-bitcoin-ha-valore?)

L'ascesa delle crittovalute ha generato una serie di opinioni contrastanti sull'argomento. Mentre alcuni hanno una visione positiva, altri le vedono come un'innovazione pericolosa e instabile. Le opinioni di questi scettici sono in gran parte influenzate da idee sbagliate. Non riescono ad apprezzare la loro vera natura, in particolare di Bitcoin, e il cambiamento positivo che apporterà.

Thomas Jeegers, esperto di crittovalute, ha affrontato questi preconcetti attraverso un'analisi approfondita dei fondamentali di Bitcoin, la crittovaluta più popolare e di valore. Autore di Understanding Crypto Fundamentals, ha conseguito due master in economia, un MBA presso l'INSEAD e diverse certificazioni finanziarie avanzate, tra cui Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), Financial Risk Manager (FRM) e certificazioni in tecnologie blockchain.

Bitcoin: una valuta decentralizzata 

Alla luce dell'incredibile crescita di Bitcoin, Jeegers ha suggerito di fare un passo indietro e di considerare il motivo per cui ha valore. Oltre a fungere da investimento, Bitcoin ha un grande valore come moneta. Possiede molte caratteristiche positive che lo distinguono dalle valute fiat. Ad esempio, Bitcoin consente “transazioni peer-to-peer”, in cui il valore si muove “digitalmente senza richiedere una terza parte di fiducia”, come una banca o uno stato. Questa decentralizzazione libera Bitcoin da vari interessi politici e dalla censura.

La natura decentralizzata di Bitcoin gli consente di fungere da “asset ESG” che può essere utilizzato per apportare benefici positivi all'ambiente, alla società e alle strutture di governance. Ad esempio, Jeegers ha citato l'uso di Bitcoin nell'Afghanistan occupato dai talebani per indebolire i tentativi del governo di sopprimere l'istruzione per le ragazze. Nel finanziare iniziative a sostegno dell'istruzione femminile, gli attivisti non possono effettuare transazioni utilizzando valute tradizionali, poiché esse sono tracciate e censurate. Bitcoin consente agli attivisti di finanziare programmi positivi senza le restrizioni dei talebani. Bitcoin libera “le mani dello stato dalla sua presa sul denaro”, incentivando transazioni volontarie libere da coercizioni centrali.

Scarsità dura e stabile

Jeegers ha identificato Bitcoin sia come una rete che come un asset. Come rete Bitcoin è “disponibile a tutti senza barriere all'ingresso”. È una “infrastruttura di pagamento pubblica” che consente a chiunque nel mondo di effettuare transazioni di valore, indipendentemente da ricchezza o status. Come asset monetario “senza una banca centrale a supporto”, offre una scarsità unica e assoluta. Le valute fiat, come il dollaro e l'euro, possiedono solo una scarsità artificiale, poiché una potenza centrale mantiene la loro relativa scarsità. Quest'ultima può essere ridotta da una potenza centrale che ne aumenta l'offerta. Bitcoin, invece, ha una scarsità naturale poiché nessuna potenza può manipolarne l'offerta. Come l'oro, fare mining di bitcoin richiede molto tempo ed energia da parte degli imprenditori privati, pertanto esso ha un'offerta più stabile e prevedibile rispetto a qualsiasi valuta fiat, la cui offerta può variare a seconda del capriccio delle banche centrali o dei governi.

Per valutare Bitcoin, Jeegers ha proposto il modello Stock-to-Flow (S2F), il quale valuta la scarsità di una commodity. Dividendo la quantità totale attuale di una commodity per la quantità introdotta ogni anno, il modello S2F calcola il numero di anni necessari affinché l'offerta raddoppi, supponendo che il tasso di creazione rimanga costante. L'oro ha un tasso S2F di circa 60 anni, il che implica un elevato livello di scarsità. Nel corso della storia l'oro è sempre stato di gran lunga l'asset con il più alto livello di scarsità (secondo il modello S2F). Jeegers ha dimostrato che il rapporto S2F di Bitcoin negli ultimi 12 mesi è quasi identico a quello del metallo giallo, a “59,93”. Inoltre il flusso in entrata di nuovi bitcoin è stato dimezzato dal cosiddetto halving, portando a oggi il rapporto S2F a “120,86”. Questo rende Bitcoin due volte più scarso dell'oro. Per la prima volta nella storia dell'umanità, l'oro non è più la merce più rara esistente al mondo.

Efficienza energetica 

Bitcoin è noto per essere “ad alto consumo energetico”, poiché richiede molta energia per il mining. Sebbene questo possa a prima vista preoccupare molti scettici, la realtà del consumo energetico di Bitcoin dovrebbe essere analizzata più nel dettaglio. Infatti l'energia utilizzata per il mining di Bitcoin è eccezionalmente economica, ovvero energia che non può essere utilizzata per altri scopi, energia inutilizzata che altrimenti andrebbe persa. Solo un'energia così economica ha senso per il mining di Bitcoin, perché un miner farebbe meglio a trovare un uso alternativo per quell'energia (vendendola a un prezzo più alto), se fosse possibile. Pertanto per il mining di Bitcoin viene utilizzata solo energia altrimenti inutilizzabile. Tale energia si trova, ad esempio, nelle rinnovabili (es. centrali idroelettriche o eoliche) di notte, quando non c'è domanda sulla rete elettrica, ma l'impianto continua a produrre elettricità. Di notte queste centrali continuano a produrre elettricità, il che significa che i proprietari devono pagare per smaltire tale energia. Facendo mining quando non c'è domanda sulla rete elettrica, esse diventano redditizie 24 ore su 24, 7 giorni su 7. L'esistenza del mining di Bitcoin offre quindi un'opportunità unica per monetizzare l'energia inutilizzata. Questa opportunità rappresenta un forte incentivo per la produzione di più centrali elettriche rinnovabili e, di conseguenza, per il miglioramento del mix elettrico utilizzato in tutto il mondo. Spiega perché la stragrande maggioranza dell'energia utilizzata per il mining di Bitcoin proviene da fonti rinnovabili (molto più che in qualsiasi altro grande Paese al mondo) e perché questa tendenza continua a migliorare. In conclusione, non solo Bitcoin NON spreca energia, ma è in realtà la migliore tecnologia disponibile oggi per incentivare lo sviluppo e l'utilizzo di infrastrutture rinnovabili. Chiunque abbia a cuore l'ambiente dovrebbe quindi essere un convinto sostenitore del mining di Bitcoin.

I trend storici indicano il futuro successo di Bitcoin?

Attraverso una curva a S, Jeegers ha dimostrato che tutte le innovazioni, come il cellulare o Internet, impiegano all'incirca lo stesso tempo per passare dallo 0% al 10% di adozione rispetto a quelle che impiegano dal 10% al 90%. Bitcoin ha impiegato 13 anni, dal suo lancio nel 2009 al 2022, per raggiungere il 10% di adozione, pertanto questo modello suggerisce che Bitcoin raggiungerà il 90% di adozione entro il 2035!

Perché Bitcoin dovrebbe crescere tanto quanto altre innovazioni di successo, come i social media o Uber? Jeegers ha sostenuto che la Legge di Metcalfe aiuta a spiegare la crescita di queste piattaforme di successo, così come la futura crescita di Bitcoin. Questa Legge afferma che una rete, come un servizio telefonico, aumenta di valore man mano che più utenti si iscrivono. Il primo telefono in assoluto non aveva alcun valore perché non c'erano altri telefoni da chiamare. Con l'avvento di nuovi telefoni il servizio telefonico è cresciuto di valore perché c'erano più persone da chiamare. Lo stesso concetto si applica a Bitcoin: ha poco valore come valuta se poche persone lo accettano, tuttavia l'utilità di cui godono gli utenti esistenti e nuovi cresce esponenzialmente man mano che più persone lo accettano. Con l'aumentare del valore della rete Bitcoin, aumenta anche l'incentivo per i non utenti ad aderire.

Metodi di valutazione

Oltre alla presentazione di Jeegers, Hubertus Hofkirchner di Bitcredit ha ricavato una stima del valore di Bitcoin come mezzo di scambio dal rapporto base-to-credit riportato da Mises durante il periodo del gold standard, pari a uno a dieci.

Nel 2021 gli attivi delle banche centrali del mondo ammontavano a $44.000 miliardi. Applicando il rapporto di Mises a quel totale, Hofkirchner ha calcolato un fabbisogno totale di base monetaria di $4.400 miliardi, ovvero il 10% del valore precedente. Ipotizzando che Bitcoin possa diventare il mezzo di scambio globale a tale rapporto, Hofkirchner calcola che Bitcoin debba essere valutato approssimativamente a $210.000 per unità, più di tre volte il prezzo al momento della stesura di questo articolo, ma ben al di sotto di alcune delle valutazioni più esorbitanti nella comunità. Ciò si traduce in una probabilità del 33% che Bitcoin raggiunga questa impresa.

Hofkirchner ha poi confrontato questo dato con il valore delle riserve auree delle banche centrali, pari al 17% del valore totale di $17.500 miliardi a maggio 2024, che si tradurrebbe in un prezzo di Bitcoin di circa $150.000 per unità. Ciò implica una probabilità del 50% che Bitcoin diventi la futura moneta globale. Le riserve auree private potrebbero aumentare questa cifra, ma potrebbero essere detenute solo a causa di dubbi sulla stabilità del sistema monetario fiat e quindi non essere più rilevanti in un sistema Bitcoin. Tutte queste valutazioni riflettono la probabilità prevista che quest'ultimo diventi un mezzo di scambio globale.

Cosa succederà adesso?

Le caratteristiche positive e uniche di Bitcoin hanno indubbiamente accresciuto il suo potenziale come mezzo di scambio. Aziende come Coinbase e Crypto.com, che consentono agli utenti di pagare in crittovalute, stanno aprendo la strada al futuro di Bitcoin. Mentre le politiche governative continuano a indebolire il valore e la stabilità delle valute fiat, Bitcoin crescerà come una copertura contro queste inefficienze monetarie.

La crescita di Bitcoin come moneta porterà a un mercato più libero e stabile, ponendo l'economia nelle mani di produttori e consumatori piuttosto che in quelle dello stato. Non sorprende che governi e sistemi bancari centrali inizialmente temessero le crittovalute, poiché le privano del loro potere di manipolazione. Di fronte all'incapacità di fermare la crescita di Bitcoin, gli stati di tutto il mondo lo stanno progressivamente abbracciando (ad esempio, negli Stati Uniti) per trarre beneficio da questa innovazione trasformativa.

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

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

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

Speculation about why Rep. Margaret Taylor Greene (R-Ga) has announced her resignation from Congress extends from her concerns about the death threats she has received to her  plans to run for governor of Georgia. MTG gave a clue when she responded to Mike Cernovich’s order to her on X: “You need to serve out your full term.” MTG responded: “Do I have to stay until I’m assassinated like our friend Charlie Kirk?”

Oh I haven’t suffered enough for you while you post all day behind a screen?

Do I have to stay until I’m assassinated like our friend Charlie Kirk.

Will that be good enough for you then?

Shit posting on the internet all day isn’t fighting.

Get off YOUR ass and run for… https://t.co/jhbqxHi3Vt

— Marjorie Taylor Greene (@mtgreenee) November 26, 2025

The post Why MTG is Resigning From Congress appeared first on LewRockwell.

Stephen Mack  wrote:

Karen & Lew,

Reposted by Karen:

Hegseth files CRIMINAL probe for ‘$48 BILLION PILFERED by ZELENSKY’ — CIA insider cites whistleblower pic.twitter.com/qyvGHmkLFk

— RT (@RT_com) November 22, 2025

It didn’t start with Zelensky. The per-capita GDP of Ukraine was only 1/3 that of Russia and Poland BEFORE the Maidan Coup.  In fact, it was only ½ the per-capita GDP of Belarus.  So in other words, the notional Breadbasket of Europe could not even approximate the economic outputs of neighboring European states.  That was a huge corruption tax put in place by the Ukrainian Crony-Elites even before the installation of the Zelensky regime.

Russia most probably did, but actually did not have to game the plebiscites for the decoupling of Crimea and the Donbas regions.  On top of the harassment the ethnic Russians in Ukraine were experiencing from the Ukro-Nazi cadres, the country itself was / is an economic basket case.  The residents in those Eastern regions had that reason alone to seek autonomy.

As I have noted before, Trump’s empty gas-bag promise of ending the conflict in Ukraine in 24 hours is made worse by the fact that during the Trump 1.0 administration, Trump and the Europeans completely ignored the Minsk 2 Accord to end the hostilities that Ukraine had signed in 2015.  The perverse irony is that any deal that Ukraine agrees to now will probably be worse for Ukraine than that codified in Minsk 2.

Once again:

If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?  President Washington, Farewell Address

The post Hegseth files CRIMINAL probe for ‘$48 BILLION PILFERED by ZELENSKY’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

Stew Peters and I are definitely on the same page.  Here’s a reminder of the email I sent around yesterday:

Listening to the talking heads on “conservative” WMAL in DC this morning on the Marjorie Taylor Greene resignation statement and her beef with Trump. To hear their interpretation, it was all about the Epstein matter. 

The big “I” word was never raised, but it could hardly be clearer that that’s what it’s all about, that and the “J” word.

The post Trump’s Zionist Genocide Pact – Slaughtering Palestinians for Prime Gaza Beach Resorts appeared first on LewRockwell.

By now everyone is aware that six Democrats in Congress created videos in which they openly encourage members of the U.S. military and Intelligence Community to mutiny against the commander in chief.  They couched their seditious statements in the pretense that they are interested only in protecting the Constitution, but their message is unmistakable: Resist President Trump’s lawful orders, and we’ll have your backs.

Americans whose minds have not been pickled by leftism are not impressed.  The Democrat instigators have been called “TikTok Traitors,” the “Seditious Six,” the “Idiot Six,” and worse.  President Trump immediately accused the lawmakers of sedition and demanded that they be arrested and stand trial for their potentially deadly provocations.  In response, the Democrat provocateurs have pretended to be outraged that the commander in chief would correctly describe their seditious actions as seditious.

Democrat word games have become so exhausting over the last thirty years.  Remember when Bill Clinton lied about his affair with twenty-two-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky by telling a grand jury, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”?  No matter how corrupt American politicians were before Clinton’s galling equivocation, it has seemed as if rhetorical obfuscation began exponentially accelerating after that moment.

Fast-forward to 2025, and former CIA director John Brennan is entirely comfortable going on national news shows and telling the world that he and fifty other “intelligence professionals” never lied about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from Hell” being Russian disinformation because the spies clearly stated in their 2020 pre-election op-ed defending the Bidens that the laptop’s treasure trove of criminality had merely “the hallmarks” of a Russian operation.  If Americans were confused about their attempt to blame Hunter’s crimes on the Russians, that’s because Americans are poor readers!

Senator Elissa Slotkin — one of the “Seditious Six,” a former CIA analyst, and a protégée of John Brennan — is busy playing the same sick word games as Slick Willy and commie Brennan.  She claims that her seditious video is meant only to draw attention to President Trump’s “illegal orders,” but when she is pressed to name one such “illegal order,” she admits that she is “not aware” of any.

If Slotkin can’t identify any of President Trump’s orders as illegal, why is she making videos encouraging rank insubordination among America’s military and intelligence personnel?  The Democrats are executing the exact same playbook that they have been using against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.  For months, Democrat governors and lawmakers have threatened federal agents with future prosecution for doing nothing more than enforcing existing immigration law and arresting criminal illegal aliens in their states.  In order to protect millions of foreign nationals from deportation, Democrats have been obstructing law enforcement operations by promising to punish officers who do their jobs.

Threatening ICE agents with unlawful and malicious prosecutions will inevitably get people killed, because in the real world, hesitation invites disaster.  When prominent Democrats encourage military and intelligence personnel to resist orders, the consequences are potentially catastrophic.  As one astute commenter notes, “the threat of weaponized lawfare against U.S. troops is seditious psychological warfare.  It’s seditious sabotage aimed at breaking the chain of command.  It’s a seditious plot to erode trust in leaders and it undermines the oath that keeps the military united and effective.”  The Democrat strategy is nefarious and straightforward: Induce service members to question the orders of their commanding officers.  Hesitation and delay during combat will not only get Americans killed, but also directly serve enemy interests.

Democrats’ attempts to confuse American service members also encourage our geopolitical adversaries to be more aggressive.  As Glenn Beck argues, “if a video like this were aimed at Putin’s military, we’d assume Russia was unstable or nearing a coup.”  Therefore, Democrats have severely “weakened America — signaling doubt to allies and opportunity to enemies.”  If you were a general in China’s military, would you be less or more willing to invade Taiwan after prominent Democrat officials encouraged division and subversion among America’s rank-and-file troops?  Public calls for insubordination make America appear destined for civil war at home and ill-prepared to defend its own interests or those of its allies abroad.

In describing his disgust with Democrats’ efforts to instigate a military rebellion against the Trump administration, Congressman Byron Donalds pulled no punches: “Donald Trump is the commander in chief, not Mr. Crow, not Senator Slotkin.  They are not the commander in chief!  And like I said before, they would not tolerate any Republican launching any video like that!”

Can you imagine?  After patriotic grandparents and Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans protested the fraudulent 2020 election by walking through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Democrats (and useful RINO idiots Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) spent tens of millions of dollars producing a theatrical congressional hearing meant to demonize all MAGA voters as “domestic terrorists” and “insurrectionists.”  If prominent Republicans in Congress had subsequently encouraged members of the military and Intelligence Community to disobey orders coming from installed-president Biden, the backlash against them would have been swift and brutal.  Not only would they have been expelled from Congress, but they also would have been arrested in the most publicly humiliating fashion.  In contrast, the “Seditious Six” sit for ego-stroking interviews during which they play victim.

This is what Republicans mean when they denounce “Democrat privilege” in the United States.  Time and again, Democrats do things with impunity that would land a normal Republican in prison for decades.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, and their fellow Russia Collusion Hoax co-conspirators will never be held accountable for manipulating intelligence to frame President Trump as a Russian spy.  Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats who bailed out arsonists during the most destructive riots in American history will never be held accountable for putting violent repeat offenders back on the street.  Alexander Vindman will never be held accountable for undermining the Trump White House and triggering a farcical impeachment.  None of the conspirators who violated state election laws and used fraudulent mail-in ballots to pretend that Sleepy Joe Biden was the most popular presidential candidate in our nation’s history will ever be held accountable for stealing the 2020 election.  Anthony Fauci won’t be held accountable for covering up the laboratory origin of COVID or hiding the worst side-effects of the mRNA “vaccines.”  Social media companies won’t be held accountable for censoring Americans who protested the stolen 2020 election or the unconstitutional “vaccine” mandates imposed by installed-president Biden’s administration.  It appears that neither Jim Comey nor Letitia James will be held accountable for respectively committing perjury and mortgage fraud.  Democrat prosecutors and judges will never be held accountable for abusing the criminal justice system to railroad President Trump, his friends, and his voters.

In the United States, two-tiered “justice” protects Democrats and renders Republicans defenseless.

Now we will see whether six Democrats can actually get away with encouraging a military mutiny.  If past is prologue, the answer is surely “yes.”

There’s a popular social media meme that succinctly describes our situation: When leftists say “our democracy,” what they mean is “our regime.”  Democrats have taken over so much of the permanent bureaucracy that even when they are out of power, they still command much of the American government.  They are emboldened to commit sedition and treason because they know that no left-leaning prosecutor, judge, or jury will hold them accountable.  This kind of in-your-face double-standard will eventually end the Union.

Let’s hope, for the sake of our country’s future, that guilty Democrats begin to pay a price.  Forgive me for not holding my breath.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Democrats Calling for Mutiny Must Be Punished appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Trump posts about Rand Paul and Thomas Massie just keep coming, including one saying the Republican Party is more unified than ever before with the exception of these terrible dissidents.

J.D. Vance evidently doesn’t feel the same, lashing out today at the “beltway GOP”:

After four years of house prices doubling (and in some areas, tripling) many young people feel priced out of the American Dream of homeownership. A welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota reveals that large numbers of new arrivals aren’t assimilating and are funneling our tax dollars to literal terrorist groups. An innocent woman was set on fire in Chicago as the mayor resists federal law enforcement resources to bring peace to one of our great cities. The Obamacare insurance system is buckling under its own weight. And the country is $38 trillion in debt.

Our administration is working hard on addressing all of these problems.

But you know what really fires up the beltway GOP? Not any of the above. Instead, the political class is really angry that the Trump administration may finally bring a four-year conflict in Eastern Europe to a close.

I’m not even talking about the substance of their views. Much of what these people have said about the Ukraine war has been proven wrong, but whatever. We can agree to disagree.

But the level of passion over this one issue when your own country has serious problems is bonkers.

It disgusts me. Show some passion for your own country.

We all know that is how Trump himself should be speaking, as opposed to denouncing his friends and praising his enemies, which has been his preference for some time now.

Meanwhile, it has come to light that Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel (honestly, try to imagine a more unserious appointment than that one), met with convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who proceeded to call the U.S. president a “madman.”

We have not heard a single word from the President about that, but we have heard that Marjorie Taylor Greene — not Mike Huckabee, who met with a literal and unrepentant spy, but Marjorie Taylor Greene — is a “traitor.”

Pollard told the Jerusalem Post in 2021, “Just as certain members of the Trump administration profess an ‘America first’ doctrine, I wholeheartedly embrace an ‘Israel first’ doctrine — and I went to jail for that for 30 years.”

Pollard has repeatedly indicated that he does not regret what he did, and has gone so far as to urge other young American Jews working in security to consider spying for Israel should they consider it necessary.

And not a single word about Huckabee’s meeting with this man?

Now had I written something critical like this six months ago, I would have received a pile of feedback accusing me of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” etc.

That’s long gone now. There’s just no defending any of this, and everyone knows it.

I want to like the guy! He has better instincts on a great many things than anyone who’s ever been in the White House. But his faults, including his failure to acknowledge loyalty and to humiliate friends while at the same time promoting people who hate his guts (Mark Levin, Lindsey Graham, et al.), are destructive.

The post What Trump Should Have Said appeared first on LewRockwell.

This video production was first released in February 2021. It was almost immediately the object of censorship by Vimeo, which closed down our account in March 2021.

Thanks to Vaccine Choice Canada it was published on Rumble.

Global Research remains indebted to our producer Ariel Noyala Rodriguez. The Rumble version is now in excess of a quarter of a million views. Bitchute version: 100,000. 

As a means to reaching out to humanity Worldwide, with the support of Lux Media, the video is now accessible with subtitles in 13 languages.

The video focusses on the first stage of Covid Crisis leading up to the Lockdown imposed on more than 190 countries.

The so-called Lockdown –which consisted in confining people in their homes while “freezing the work-place” was conducive to a Worldwide process of economic and social collapse, coupled with a  carefully engineered Fear Campaign at the level of the entire planet. 

The Global Research video confirms unequivocally that there Never Was a “New Corona Virus”, There Never Was a Pandemic. 

At the foot of this article, we invite our readers to download Michel Chossudovsky’s E-Book entitled The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity, published in August 2022, following its print publication in Japanese, in April 2022.

Our objective is to reach out to people worldwide: In the Middle East, Africa,  The Americas, Western Europe, Russia, China, India, East and South East Asia, The Pacific.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post Covid Documentary: The Most Devastating Crisis in Human History appeared first on LewRockwell.

Danger danger!,… the sky is falling.  It’s sooo easy to get sucked into scare-pieces about nuclear war, pandemics, school shootings, climate collapse,..they get clicks and reads.

Having felt uneasy about “The End is Near” prognostications and seeing mad dashes to religion, I noticed the pattern and how weak and helpless this made me feel.  When I ignored these constant warnings I was happy, fearless and felt bold and strong.

Hard-wired Neuro

It was many years later, tipped off by the placebo/nocebo effect that I looked back at our autonomic nervous system.

Being happy and carefree in a positive state of mind results in parasympathetic healing benefits.

Conversely worry, anxiety and depression activate sympathetic fight/flight hormones like adrenaline and cortisol which prevent healing, restful sleep, correct breathing and trash the IQ. Energy is shunted from vital organs to provide muscular strength to meet imminent danger.

Primitive superstitious peoples have been known to drop-dead from fear of spells, demons and night monsters.  Their tribal beliefs are that powerful!

Once sympathetic activation takes hold, endorphins fade and we become nervous as rabbits, minds squirm and decision making stinks.

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton’s “Biology of Belief,” (Sympathetic/Parasympathetic balance) determines one’s DNA EXPRESSION, leading to disease or wellness; psychosomatic conditions like cancer and heart disease,..or “miracle” healings.  This the crux of the mostly forgotten “Mind/Body” connection.

In my research I have found that negative states of consciousness reduce spiritual connectedness to the universal energy field, stifle intuition & judgement and spread like wildfire among others as seen with covid fear mongering and “mass formation psychosis.”

The News

News once travelled at the speed of a donkey cart,.. not now.  Instant communications rely on the sensational, prurient and spread terrifying reports that grab eyeballs..Those hooked on commercial journalism can’t help but experience low-level anxiety at the very least,… or like Orson Welles’ “War Of The World” broadcast are driven to all-out paranoia, grab shotguns and go out to meet the Martians.

We once were on high alert to spot Arab Terrorists after 9/11, the country went into full security, shoes were removed at airports and nobody trusted anybody.

Twenty years later, another major scare was created by medical officials and complicit media over covid19, the nation was shut-down and locked-up.  I personally was denied entrance to restaurants without a silly paper mask and rudely accosted several times by scared old ladies in stores.

Communications from vaxxination naysayers were censored.  We became a “vaxxed-nation.”

I remain convinced the covid scare alone was deadly, not only due to sympathetic nervous domination, but people’s poor decisions to accept a sketchy fast-tracked warp-speed mRNA shot.

Government intelligence operatives, big money from pharma corps, defense contractors, political tricksters and foreign malign states currently control congress, network narratives, absurd disinformation and your reality.

Anyone with the cash can now run a troll farm, buy dishonest podcasters or fund demonstrations and pay provocateurs.

A.I.?

We have been under an artificial reality for decades, programmed with vicarious life experiences by every TV news report, drama and movie replete with subliminal musical scores.

This is the backdrop of our society.  Portrayals of patriotism, war heroes, gun violence, police gallantry and romantic situations make us think we live in a Hollywood movie!

“Jeopardy” geniuses win on the basis of how much popular entertainment they consume and remember, but fail miserably when it comes to practical real-world experience known to every farm kid.

TV broadcasts are so dangerous to human health that Dr. Andrew Weil once recommended news fasting! 

As I just described; Sympathetic Anxiety and Parasympathetic Healing are the reasons why.

After radio and television came screens and phones and hypnotic social media.  Kids stayed in their rooms thinking “Zuckberg World” was better than face to face relationshipping.

Turns out they don’t date, marry, reproduce or own homes, eventually to become miserable physically-diseased bots, victims of the artificial world their lazy asses became addicted to.

CLUE;  Computer generated “friends” are not real!  Get a dog and go outside!

Don’t Fear the Reaper;

I can remember the exact moment my life changed forever.  I was 5. We were headed to the grocery on 8th Ave.  As we passed NE 128th street a shocking realization hit me.  “Mom, why do we die?”

I don’t recall a reply.  My world was too broken to cry.  Like animals, I had been immortal.  Now death consciousness would haunt my days,… but only if I let it.

It’s only the construct of the ego, the person we molded ourselves into as children. 

And death consciousness keeps us vulnerable to fear and external control.

Rational thought and logic as an adult can break the grip of the mold and earn domination over a juvenile ego so we can reinvent ourselves.    

Selfishness and greed nixx integrity and morality where money is involved because a sense of scarcity becomes a threat to their crippled confidence and shaky survival.

Doubt filled minds of low self esteem and poor situational awareness lack rational thinking.  They simply follow the herd and are easily peer-shamed and controlled.

( Eckhart Tolle wrote masterfully on spirituality and the ego )

Synchronicity

Once the ego is brought to heel, higher consciousness takes over.

One might think of acquaintances who appear shortly, or he may dally, finding only later he had just “missed” an accident on the highway.

These occurrences have been common to me and no longer surprising.

Maybe I just tuned in, but I have observed trends in nature and people for many years.

Hunters and fishermen rely on solunar tables to improve their timing and chances afield.  These astronomical tables pinpoint major and minor times of activity in fish, game and even,…people. When the moon is overhead or under the earth these are major times. Minor times occur at moon rise or moon set.  Sunrise and sunset also signal increased activity.

Ever notice an increase in energy a few days before a full or new moon?  Rescue personnel, police and ER personnel see things get crazy busy, while I notice we tackle more hard farm chores then.

Astrological Sun and Moon positions also reveal trends.

Ever notice how smooth or challenging days are around moon locations in your Birth Sign?  I never bet the ranch on astrology, but the trends are clear.

Things just go better when we are in tune with the cosmos.

“The Old Farmer’s Almanac” gives the best times for various activities like planting, starting/ending projects, setting posts or slaughtering animals…One develops a sense of timing over the years and I find after the fact that the chores I just performed fit their predictions.

Timing is EVERYTHING!

Remember this tune? 

Through long-term experience, these astronomical and astrological observations have gone beyond belief into certainty.

After all, the gravitational and electromagnetic effects of moons and planets on ocean tides and water-based life forms is scientifically defensible.

Stars seem too distant to influence tides, yet today we see photons emanating from them from billions of years ago and those photons are energy.  Called pseudoscience similar to the widely dismissed idea of the human body as an electromagnetic organism, I find them real and practically applicable.

Hunting and fishing every year have proven the value of solunar timing.  

Deep-dropping with electric reels for golden tilefish with my Dad, way down into the pitch-darkness 100 fathoms below, proved they would bite like crazy around the noon hour with a full moon under. How could they know?

 An hour before or an hour after the high noon bite yielded zero fish while hitting the solunar sweet-spot always filled the cooler, year after year after year. 

Being sensitive to intuitions, following calendars, almanacs, seasons, sun&moon positions, astrological signs and sun/moon solunar geometry made my life better than just plodding along into another day.

The “6th sense” is common to animals,… and humans who can quiet their mental monkey-chatter and hear that little voice inside their head.

Humans are burdened by a complex brain and particularly a left hemisphere concerned with words and numbers and we think too much.  The right hemisphere is more concerned with shapes, pictures and imagination.  We still contain a primitive “animal brain” which operates in the present moment,… animals are highly intuitive, knowing when danger is near and even sensing mal-intent from predators and humans.  When our lower centers are in charge; we are unconcerned with time, memories of the past, projections of the future,… and intuitions become more prominent.

I’m more sensitive to celestial occurrences and intuitive prompts, and usually ignore the daily mainstream media,… if only to save my sanity!

Mind you; Astronomical and astrological alignments, and flashes of intuition are only statistically significant trends.

Anything can happen at any time, but coincidences to me are no longer random.

Un-doom/Un-gloom

I cannot dwell on the paranoid verbal diarrhea of doomsayers or the shocking political news of the day.  Though it follows us like chewing gum on a shoe; I take their fear messaging with a grain of salt.

To be aware of world events is a prudent thing, but a neurotic life of constant worry is no life at all.  

Neurotic people are best avoided; they’ll make ya crazy!

Many are seduced by political peace and prosperity lies like dumb kids with the promise of candy.

These may be your peers, not mine, but look at what we have become collectively under a nefarious mass delusion.  

I travel to the beat of my inner drummer and the electromagnetic pulses of the heavens.

I communicate with my dog telepathically as many can relate.

Intuition tops-off logical thought.

I need no verification of a truer reality I have come to know.

Censorship, taboos and culturally-correct language are the tools of governments, religions and embedded billionaires to control our minds.

Falsehoods become truth and those speaking truth are stigmatized, cancelled or killed.

It’s a long con, and once programmed; most believers will believe forever.

So controversial stuff like astrology, Pauling/Vitamin C, Ivermectin, UFOs and psychic phenomena are relegated to the dust-bin of pseudoscience, quackery and superstition.

You decide what is real.

Claim your intellectual freedom!

AUTHOR NOTE; My posts have always been free. Please forward them to friends and relatives. Your health is my greatest reward!

The post Enough Glooming and Dooming… The Invisible and Cosmic Biology of Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 1842, when Fr. Edward Sorin stepped onto the cold Indiana prairie, he set out to build a Catholic university that would shape saints, sharpen minds, and send out citizens anchored in faith. The place was small, the winters brutal, and the resources thin. But Sorin insisted that Notre Dame would shine as a “powerful means for good,” a clear expression of Catholic identity in a country that often misunderstood the Church.

For generations, that promise held. Parents sent their children there expecting more than lectures and degrees. They expected a formation, a moral compass, and an encounter with something higher than ambition.

Walk the campus today and that founding spirit feels more like a memory guarded by the Golden Dome than a mission alive in the classrooms. Notre Dame still looks Catholic. The crosses shine and the basilica stands tall. Meanwhile, “Touchdown Jesus” surveys the stadium with a look that, after recent events, seems less triumphant than quietly exasperated.

And that exasperation feels justified. The most telling sign came this autumn, slipped into an administrative update with the subtlety of a company announcing layoffs on a Friday afternoon. The university dropped “acceptance and support for the Catholic mission” from its core staff values. For two decades, that line reminded everyone why Notre Dame existed in the first place. Then it vanished. No explanation, no discussion, just gone.

In its place came four corporate-scented virtues—community, collaboration, excellence, innovation—the kind of language you expect from a tech firm trying to boost morale not a university founded under the mantle of Our Lady. If the FBI removed “uphold the law” from its mission, people would scream. A Catholic university removing its mission should spark the same reaction.

The administration insists the mission has not changed. Removing it from the list, they say, was meant to broaden the mission, not bury it. One can almost imagine Fr. Sorin hearing this explanation and instinctively reaching for holy water. A mission strengthened by being removed is the kind of logic that thrives only in conference rooms where the coffee is endless and the convictions are on life support.

It would be comical if it weren’t so serious. Notre Dame eventually returned the Catholic mission to its core values, but only after enormous pressure. The reversal was forced, not heartfelt, and it doesn’t diminish the severity of the original sin.

And the seriousness becomes even clearer when you look at what was happening well before the Catholic-mission debacle. In recent years, Notre Dame has swollen its diversity, equity, and inclusion machinery with the eagerness of a school chasing applause from people who want nothing to do with its faith.

In September, when the Indiana attorney general requested records on the university’s DEI practices, the response wasn’t transparency but silence. When scrutiny increased, the DEI center simply changed its name, swapping one label for another while keeping the same work humming beneath it. The move was less a reform than a costume change, as if repainting a sign could disguise the ideological engine running behind it.

DEI programs, by design, demand the sorting of students and staff by categories the Church has always viewed with caution: race, sex, and identity. Catholic teaching insists on the unity of the human person. DEI insists on the primacy of demographic boxes. One speaks to dignity. The other speaks to data points. Notre Dame’s attempt to blend these without conflict has produced the same result seen at many once-faithful institutions: a slow substitution of Catholic truth with secular fashion, wrapped in the reassuring language of progress.

The Sycamore Trust, a group of alumni devoted to preserving the university’s Catholic character, notes that the shift is already visible in hiring. The proportion of Catholic faculty members, once proudly disclosed, is now hidden with a level of discretion usually reserved for scandals. The administration talks about the importance of diversity. It talks less about the importance of Catholics teaching at a Catholic university. The school now treats the Faith as an optional flavor, a little seasoning for show rather than the substance that once shaped souls.

Notre Dame still wants the appearance of being unmistakably Catholic, but it no longer wants the demands that come with it. The statues are kept spotless. The faith beneath them is treated with a cautious arm’s length, the way one handles a valuable heirloom that clashes with the new décor. The university still hosts Mass, still speaks of tradition, still sells rosaries in the bookstore. Yet in its highest decisions, the school behaves more like a religion-averse research institution that happens to own a chapel.

There is a dark humor in watching a university founded in the name of Our Lady try to reassure critics that, despite its new policies, the mission is “all-encompassing.” The mission has indeed grown all-encompassing, but not in the way Fr. Sorin imagined. It now encompasses everything except the very thing that made it Catholic in the first place.

Notre Dame is not lost yet. Its students still pray. Its alumni still hope. Its chapel still fills with families who believe the university can recover its purpose. But recovery begins with radical honesty.

The founders built Notre Dame with courage and clarity. They knew what they stood for, and they said it clearly. If today’s leaders wish to honor that heritage, they must reclaim the same spirit. Keep the buildings. Keep the beauty. But restore the backbone the founders assumed would never be lost. Restoring the Catholic mission on paper is not enough; the conviction has to return with it.

A university that forgets why it exists will soon forget whom it serves. And once that happens, the Golden Dome becomes just another decoration on a campus slowly forgetting the name it carries.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post Don’t Be Fooled: Notre Dame’s About-Face Isn’t a Return to Faith appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.”—Daniel Webster

We find ourselves approaching that time of year when, as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, we’re supposed to give thanks as a nation and as individuals for our safety and our freedoms.

It’s not an easy undertaking.

The contrast between George Washington’s first Thanksgiving proclamation and the state of the nation today reveals how far we have drifted—and how low we have fallen—since Washington called upon early Americans (a nation of immigrants) to give thanks for a government that protected their safety and happiness, and for a Constitution designed to safeguard civil and religious liberty.

But how do you give thanks for freedoms that are constantly being eroded?

How do you express gratitude for one’s safety when the perils posed by the American police state grow more treacherous by the day?

How do you come together as a nation in thanksgiving when the powers-that-be continue to polarize and divide us into warring factions?

To our collective misfortune, we have been saddled with a government that is a far cry from Washington’s vision: governed by wise, just, constitutional laws; faithfully executed by principled public servants; promoting peace, virtue, and liberty; and fostering the prosperity of the nation.

Instead, the U.S. government has become a warring empire: lawless in its ambitions, militarized in its posture, abusive in its policing, and increasingly hostile to conscience, truth, and constitutional limits.

Washington never intended Thanksgiving to be a day of glib platitudes—a moment to be grateful for whatever crumbs the government chooses to bestow upon us. He intended it to be a day of reflection, honesty, and moral accounting, a day when the nation examines its failures, acknowledges its wrongs, and commits to restoring liberty in the year ahead.

If Thanksgiving is to mean anything in times such as these, it must also compel us to speak plainly about the forces that threaten our freedom. Giving thanks for our blessings requires the courage to say “no thanks” to the very forces working to strip away the blessings we claim to celebrate.

In that true spirit of Thanksgiving, here is a sobering list of things for which we should not give thanks in this age of the American police state.

Say “no thanks” to oligarchy and self-serving, pay-to-play politics. A pay-to-play culture now permeates the highest levels of government, dominated by a mindset that money—not law—defines the boundaries of power. America is being bought and sold by corporate elites and political cronies. “We the People” have been pushed into a permanent underclass, ruled by a political machine that monetizes every aspect of governance—surveillance, policing, incarceration, immigration enforcement, even war itself. Our elected officials increasingly represent the interests of the wealthy and well-connected rather than the rights and needs of the citizenry. This is oligarchy masquerading as representative government.

Say “no thanks” to an imperial presidency that rules by fiat. Executive power has metastasized into something the Framers would not recognize. In 2025 alone, we have seen:

• sweeping executive orders redefining law without Congress’ oversight or approval,
• federal agencies weaponized against political enemies,
• unilateral decisions to deploy federal troops domestically,
• and attempts to redefine constitutional rights by proclamation.

Whether the occupant of the Oval Office is a Republican or Democrat, the result is the same: presidents now behave as lawmakers, judges, and enforcers combined — a constitutional impossibility and a recipe for dictatorship. The Founders warned us plainly: when one person claims the authority to rule by decree, liberty is already in mortal danger.

Say “no thanks” to martial law and standing armies used against the American people. What once would have been unthinkable is now routine. National Guard units have been federalized to police protests. Tactical teams roam American streets outfitted like combat forces. A generation of Americans is growing up under the shadow of armored vehicles and militarized responses to ordinary civil unrest. This year’s federal deployments in California and elsewhere following ICE raids—justified by vague claims of “restoring order”—are only the latest sign. A government comfortable using soldiers against its own citizens is a government that has abandoned the constitutional line between civilian authority and military force.

Say “no thanks” to the government’s fear tactics. Fear is the oldest tool of tyranny. We have seen fear weaponized to justify:

• speech crackdowns,
• “domestic threat” watchlists,
• expanded surveillance authorities,
• “emergency powers” without end,
• and the rounding up of vulnerable populations under the guise of safety.

From mental-health “round-ups” to demands that soldiers obey unlawful commands without question, fear has become the operating currency of government power. When the people are afraid, they can be controlled. When one’s right to conscience is criminalized, that conscience can be silenced.

Say “no thanks” to endless wars. For more than two decades, the U.S. has been mired in endless wars without clear objectives, limits, or endpoints. The war footing has become perpetual—an unbroken justification for secrecy, surveillance, militarization, and unchecked executive power. Wars abroad have consequences at home: they brutalize our politics, exhaust our populace, expand federal power, and normalize the idea that violence—rather than diplomacy, law, or liberty—is the default solution for national problems.

Say “no thanks” to everywhere wars. When government can label anyone, anywhere, an “enemy” in order to wage war, we are all in danger. That danger is no longer theoretical. In the same breath that the administration touts lethal military strikes against Venezuelan boats in Caribbean waters, federal agents are conducting coordinated militarized raids on communities across the country. The lesson to be learned: a nation permanently on war footing eventually turns its war machinery inward.

Say “no thanks” to the transformation of domestic police into extensions of the military.  For decades, billions in Pentagon gear—tanks, drones, armored carriers, battlefield weapons — have been funneled to local police under the 1033 military surplus program. Training once reserved for war zones has become standard for domestic policing. The results are unmistakable:

• SWAT raids for routine warrants,
• trigger-happy policing,
• a “kill or be killed” mentality,
• and communities patrolled like occupied territories.

The police are no longer peace officers. They are an occupying force.

Say “no thanks” to ICE raids that trample constitutional rights and terrorize communities. What began as an agency tasked with immigration enforcement has mutated into something far darker: a roaming domestic strike force. ICE’s quota-driven model incentivizes arrests at all costs, creating a bounty-hunter culture in which constitutional rights are obstacles, not guarantees. From coast to coast, ICE goon squads—incognito, thuggish, fueled by profit-driven incentives and outlandish quotas, and empowered by the Trump administration to act as if they are untouchable—are prowling neighborhoods, churches, courthouses, hospitals, bus stops, and worksites, anywhere “suspected” migrants might be present, snatching people first and asking questions later. No one is off limits—not even American citizens.

Say “no thanks” to a government mindset that seeks to transform the nation into a prison state. From the creation of Alligator Alcatraz to the administration’s $170 billion plan for megaprisons, the U.S. incarceration system is being expanded at breakneck speed. Combined with predictive enforcement, surveillance dragnets, and limits on due process, the United States is rapidly becoming a prison state — one that cages not only bodies, but autonomy, dissent, and opportunity.

Say “no thanks” to a surveillance state that has become a fourth branch of government.  We now live in a world in which everything—your words, your purchases, your location, your associations—is recorded, stored, and weaponized by the government and its corporate partners in crime. The surveillance state watches, catalogs, and predicts everything we do. This year alone has seen the normalization of:

• Palantir-powered national tracking systems,
• AI threat-scoring of ordinary Americans,
• geofence warrants turning whole neighborhoods into suspects,
• biometric mandates proposed as “public health tools,”
• and the creation of federal databases of “pre-crime indicators.”

Say “no thanks” to a government that punishes the poor. 2025 has brought a brutal resurgence of debtors’ courts, cash-bail coercion, poverty penalties, and retaliatory prosecutions. The criminal legal system has become a two-tiered caste structure—harsh for the poor, lenient for the powerful.

Say “no thanks” to policies that muzzle dissent. Whistleblowers, journalists, activists, and critics continue to find themselves targeted for speaking truth to power. In a climate where thought crimes and “dangerous ideas” are policed, those who criticize the government are increasingly being portrayed as traitors and subjected to investigation and prosecution.

Say “no thanks” to courts that rubber-stamp government power. Time and again, the courts have chosen order over justice, secrecy over transparency, and government power over constitutional rights—refusing to rein in geofence warrants, no-knock raids, military deployments, or the ever-expanding surveillance state.

Say “no thanks” to a government that criminalizes the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Perhaps the most alarming development of all is the growing chorus of political voices calling for the arrest—even the execution—of those who urge members of the military to follow their conscience and refuse unlawful, unconstitutional orders. Let us be clear: the American military’s oath is to the Constitution—not to any president, political agenda, or unlawful order. Anyone who suggests otherwise should be court-martialed.

Say “no thanks” to government theft disguised as fines, fees, taxes, and forfeitures. When the government can seize your home, your car, your money, or your property without due process, you are no longer a free citizen—you are a subject. Asset forfeiture, civil penalties, red-light cameras, code-enforcement schemes, and debt-trap fines have turned the government at all levels into a predatory revenue machine. The line between public property and private property has vanished. This is legalized theft.

At some point, we’ve got to face up to the uncomfortable truth that freedom is slipping through our fingers, and that the government now poses a greater threat to our safety than any outside force ever could.

We cannot keep pretending that “it can’t happen here” while it is happening all around us.

There comes a point at which no people—not even a patient, hopeful, long-suffering people—can continue pretending that the crumbs of liberty left to them constitute freedom.

Thanksgiving is supposed to remind us of our blessings. But it is also meant to remind us of our responsibilities.

A free people must do more than count their blessings.

We must guard them. We must assert them. We must defend them—even when doing so is dangerous, costly, or unpopular.

There is still time to turn back from the brink, but the hour is late.

If we want future generations to enjoy even a measure of the freedom we inherited, then “We the People” must refuse to go quietly into the machinery of the police state.

We must refuse to be governed by fear.

We must refuse to surrender our rights for the illusion of safety.

And we must refuse to bow to those who insist that conscience is treason and obedience is the highest virtue.

The Founders gave us a constitutional republic on the condition that we fight to keep it. That responsibility cannot be outsourced to politicians, courts, or parties. It rests squarely with the people themselves, with those who refuse to surrender conscience, rights, or truth to the demands of tyrants.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the only force strong enough to restrain government overreach is an informed, engaged, and courageous citizenry that will not trade its birthright for the hollow comforts of authoritarianism.

The future of freedom depends not on presidents or parties but on “We the People”—ordinary individuals who refuse to be silent, refuse to be intimidated, and refuse to give up on the promise of America.

So this Thanksgiving, let us give thanks. But let us also say—with clarity and conviction—no thanks to tyranny, in whatever form it takes.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post Giving Thanks for Our Blessings Means Saying ‘No Thanks’ to Police State Tyranny appeared first on LewRockwell.

At the dawning of the British Empire in 1818, the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned a memorable sonnet freighted with foreboding about the inevitable decline of all empires, whether in ancient Egypt or then-modern Britain.

In Shelly’s stanzas, a traveler in Egypt comes across the ruins of a once-monumental statue, with “a shattered visage lying half sunk” in desert sands bearing the “sneer of cold command.” Only its “trunkless legs of stone” remain standing. Yet the inscription carved on those stones still proclaims: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” And in a silent mockery of such imperial hubris, all the trappings of that awesome power, all the palaces and fortresses, have been utterly erased, leaving only a desolation “boundless and bare” as “the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Taken too literally, those verses might lead us to anticipate some future traveler finding fragments of St. Paul’s Cathedral scattered on the banks of the Thames River in London or stones from the Washington Monument strewn in a kudzu-covered field near the Potomac. Shelley is, however, offering us a more profound lesson that every empire teaches and every imperialist then forgets: Imperial ascent begets an inevitable decline.

Imperial Washington

Indeed, these days Donald Trump’s Washington abounds with monuments to overblown imperial grandeur and plans for more, all of which add up to an unconvincing denial that America’s global imperium is facing an Ozymandias-like fate. With his future Gilded Age ballroom meant to rise from the rubble of the White House’s East Wing, his plans for a massive triumphal arch at the city’s entrance, and a military parade of tanks and troops clanking down Constitution Avenue on his birthday, who could ever imagine such a thing?  Not Donald Trump, that’s for sure.

In a celebration of his “works” that are supposedly making the “mighty despair” in foreign capitals around the world, his former national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, has recently argued in Foreign Affairs that the president’s “policy of peace through strength” is reversing a Democrat-induced decline of U.S. global power. According to O’Brien, instead of crippling NATO (as his critics claim), President Trump is “leading the biggest European rearmament of the postwar era”; unleashing military innovation “to counter China”; and proving himself the “indispensable global statesman by driving efforts to bring peace to… long-standing disputes” in Gaza, the Congo, and, quite soon, Ukraine as well. Even in North America, according to O’Brien, Trump’s attempt to acquire Greenland has forced Denmark to expand its military presence, putting Russia on notice that the West will compete for control of the Arctic.

As it happens, whatever the truth of any of that may be, the policy elements that O’Brien cites are certain to prove largely irrelevant to the ceaseless struggle for geopolitical power among the globe’s great empires. Or, to borrow a favorite Trumpian epithet from the president’s “cornucopia of crudeness,” in the relentless, often ruthless world of grand strategy, none of those factors amounts to a hill of “shit.”

Indeed, O’Brien’s epic catalogue of Trump’s supposed foreign policy successes cleverly avoids any mention of the central factor in the rise and fall of every dominant world power for the past 500 years: energy. While the United States made genuine strides toward a green energy revolution under President Joe Biden, his successor, the “drill, baby, drill” president, has seemed determined not just to destroy those gains, but to revert to dependence on fossil fuels “bigly,” as Trump would say. In a perplexing paradox, President Trump’s systematic attack on alternative energy at home will almost certainly subvert America’s geopolitical power abroad. How and why? Let me explain by dipping my toes in a bit of history.

For the past five centuries, the rise of every global empire has rested on an underlying transformation (or perhaps revolution would be a more accurate word for it) in the form of energy that drove its version of the world economy. Innovation in the basic force behind its rising global presence gave each successive hegemonic power — Portugal, Spain, England, the United States, and possibly now China — a critical competitive advantage, cutting costs and increasing profits. That energy innovation and the lucrative commerce it created infused each successive imperium with intangible but substantial power, impelling its armed forces relentlessly forward and crushing resistance to its rule, whether by local groups or would-be imperial rivals. Although scholars of imperial history often ignore it, energy should be considered, as I argued in my book To Govern the Globe, the determinative factor in the rise and fall of every global hegemon for the past five centuries.

Iberia’s Mastery of Muscle

In the fifteenth century, the Iberian powers — Portugal and Spain — manipulated the ocean winds and maximized the energy output of the human body, giving them new forms of energy that allowed their arid lands and limited populations to conquer much of the globe. By replacing the square sail of lumbering Mediterranean ships with a triangular sail, agile Portuguese vessels like the famed caravela de armada doubled their capacity to tack close to the wind, allowing them to master the world’s oceans.

By 1500, Portuguese warships had navigation instruments that allowed them to cross the widest bodies of water, sails to beat into the strongest headwinds, a sturdy hull for guns and cargo, and lethal cannons that could destroy enemy fleets or breach the walls of port cities. As a result, a small flotilla of Portuguese caravels soon conquered colonies on both sides of the South Atlantic Ocean and seized control of Asian sea lanes from the Red Sea to the Java Sea.

For the next three centuries, such sailing ships would transport 11 million African captives across the Atlantic to work as slaves in a new form of agriculture that was both exceptionally cruel and extraordinarily profitable: the sugar plantation. The output of Europe’s free yeoman farmers was then constrained by the limits of the individual body and the temperate climate’s short six-month growing season. By contrast, enslaved laborers, massed into efficient teams in tropical latitudes, were driven year-round to the brink of death and beyond to extract unprecedented productivity and profits from those plantations. Indeed, even as late as the nineteenth century, the U.S. southern slave plantation was, according to an econometric analysis, 35% more efficient than a northern family farm.

After developing the sugar plantation, or fazenda, as a new form of agribusiness on small islands off the coast of Africa in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese brought that system to Brazil in the sixteenth century. From there, it migrated to European colonies in the Caribbean, making that cruel commerce synonymous with the slave trade for nearly four centuries. So profitable was the slave plantation for its owners that, unlike almost every other form of production, it did not die from natural economic causes but would instead require the full force of the British navy to do it in.

The Dutch Harness the Winds

But the true masters of wind power would prove to be the Dutch, whose technological prowess would allow their small land, devoid of natural resources, to conquer a colonial empire that spanned three continents. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch drive for scientific innovation led them to harness the winds as never before, building sailing ships 10 times the size of a Portuguese caravel and windmills that, among other things, replaced the tedious hand sawing of logs to produce lumber for shipbuilding. With giant sails spanning over 90 feet, a five-ton shaft generating up to 50 horsepower, and several sawing frames with six steel blades each, a windmill’s four-man crew could turn 60 tree trunks a day into uniform planks to maintain the massive Dutch merchant fleet of 4,000 ocean-going ships.

By 1650, the Zaan district near Amsterdam, arguably Europe’s first major industrial area, had more than 50 wind-driven sawmills and was the world’s largest shipyard, launching 150 hulls annually (at half the cost of English-built vessels). Many of these were the Dutch-designed fluitschip, an agile three-masted cargo vessel that cut crew size, doubled sailing speed, and could carry 500 tons of cargo with exceptional efficiency.

Through its commercial acumen and mastery of wind power, tiny Holland defeated the mighty Spanish empire in the Thirty Years War (1618-48), then fought the British to a standstill in three massive naval wars, while building an empire that reached around the world — from the Spice Islands of Indonesia to the city of New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan.

When Coal Was King

As Holland’s commercial empire began to fade, however, Great Britain was already launching an energy transition to coal-fired steam energy that would leave the wind and muscle power of the Iberian age in the dust of history. And the industrial revolution that went with it would build the world’s first truly global empire.

The Scottish inventor James Watt perfected the steam engine by 1784. Such machines began driving railways in 1825 and the Royal Navy’s warships in the 1840s. By then, an armada of steam engines was transforming the nature of work worldwide — driving sawmills, pulling gang plows, and sculpting the earth’s surface with steam shovels, steam dredges, and steam rollers. Between 1880 and 1900, the number of steam engines in the United States would triple from 56,000 units to 156,000, accounting for 77% of all American industrial power. To fuel that age of steam and steel, Britain’s coal production climbed to a peak of 290 million tons in 1913, while worldwide production reached 1.3 billion tons.

Coal was the catalyst for an industrial revolution that fused steam technology with steel production to make Britain the master of the world’s oceans. From the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, tiny Britain with just 40 million people would preside over a global empire that controlled a quarter of all humanity directly through colonies and another quarter indirectly through client states. In addition to its vast territorial empire, Britannia ruled the world’s waves, while its pound sterling became the global reserve currency, and London the financial center of the planet.

America’s Petrol-Powered Hegemony

Just as Britain’s imperial age had coincided with its coal-driven industrial revolution, so Washington’s brand-new world order focused on crude oil to feed the voracious energy needs of its global economy. By 1950, in the wake of World War II, the U.S. petrol-powered economy was producing half the world’s economic output and using that raw economic power for commercial and military dominion over most of the planet (outside the Sino-Soviet communist bloc).

By 1960, the Pentagon had built a nuclear triad that gave it a formidable strategic deterrent, as five nuclear-powered submarines armed with atomic warheads trolled the ocean depths, while 14 nuclear-armed aircraft carriers patrolled the world’s oceans. Flying from 500 U.S. overseas military bases, the Strategic Air Command had 1,700 bombers ready for nuclear strikes.

As American automobile ownership climbed from 40 million units in 1950 to 200 million in 2000, the country’s oil consumption surged from 6.5 million barrels daily to a peak of 20 million. During those same decades, the federal government spent $370 billion to cover the country with 46,000 miles of interstate highways, allowing cars and trucks to replace railroads as the ribs of the nation’s transportation infrastructure.

To drive the carbon-fueled economy of Washington’s world order, there would be a dramatic, five-fold increase in the global consumption of liquid fossil fuels during the last half of the twentieth century. As the number of motor vehicles worldwide kept climbing, crude oil rose from 27% of global fossil-fuel consumption in 1950 to 44% by 2003, surpassing coal to become the world’s main source of energy.

To meet this relentlessly rising demand, the Middle East’s share of global oil production climbed from just 7% in 1945 to 35% in 2003. As the self-appointed guardian of the Persian Gulf whose vast oil reserves represented some 60% of the world’s total, Washington would become embroiled in endless wars in that tumultuous region, from the Gulf War of 1990-91 to its present-day interventions in Israel and Iran.

Whether thanks to Britain’s coal-fired factories or America’s auto traffic, all those carbon emissions were already producing signs of global warming that, by the 1990s, would set alarm bells ringing among scientists worldwide. From the “pre-industrial” baseline of 280 parts per million (ppm) in 1880, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere kept climbing to 410 ppm by 2018, resulting in the rising seas, devastating fires, raging storms, and protracted droughts that came to be known as global warming.

As evidence of the climate crisis became undeniable, the world’s nations responded with striking unanimity by signing the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement to cut carbon emissions and surge investments into alternative energy that soon yielded significant breakthroughs in both cost and efficiency. Within four years, the International Energy Agency predicted that dramatic drops in the cost of solar panels meant that solar energy would soon be “the new king of the world’s electricity markets.” Indeed, as technology slashed the cost of battery storage and solar panels, the International Renewable Energy Agency reported in 2024 that the solar generation of electricity had become 41% cheaper than fossil fuels, while offshore wind was 53% cheaper — a truly significant disparity that will, as technology continues to slash the cost of solar energy, render the use of coal and natural gas for electricity an economic irrationality, if not an utter absurdity.

In the game of empires, seemingly small margins can have large consequences, often marking the difference between dominance and subordination, success and failure — whether the 35% advantage of enslaved over free labor, the 50% cost advantage for Dutch sailing craft over British ones, and now a 41% savings for solar over fossil fuels. Moreover, the day is fast coming when fossil-fuel electricity will cost more than twice as much as alternative energy from solar and wind power.

To assure America’s economic future, the administration of President Joe Biden began investing trillions of dollars in alternative energy by building battery plants, encouraging massive wind and solar projects, and continuing a consumer subsidy to sustain Detroit’s transition to electric vehicles. In January 2025, however, Donald Trump entered the White House (again) determined to roll back the global green revolution. After quitting the Paris climate accord and labeling climate change a “hoax” or “the green new scam,” President Trump has halted construction of major offshore wind projects, ended the subsidy for electric vehicle purchases, and opened yet more federal lands for coal and oil leases. Armed with extraordinary executive powers and a single-minded determination, he will predictably delay, if not derail, America’s transition to alternative energy, missing market opportunities and undercutting the country’s economic competitiveness by chaining it to overpriced fossil fuels.

China’s Green-Energy Ride to Global Power

While Washington was demolishing America’s green energy infrastructure, Beijing has been working to make China a global powerhouse for alternative energy. Ten years ago, its leaders launched a “Made in China 2025” program to storm the heights of the global economy by becoming the world leader in 10 strategic industries, eight of which involved some aspect of the green-energy transformation, including “new materials,” “high-tech ships,” “advanced railways,” “energy-saving and new energy vehicles,” and “energy equipment.” Those “new materials” include China’s virtual monopoly on rare earth minerals, which are absolutely critical to the manufacturing of the key components for renewable energy — specifically, wind turbines, solar panels, energy storage systems, electric vehicles, and hydrogen extraction. In sum, Beijing is already riding the green energy revolution in a serious bid to become the world’s “leading manufacturing superpower” by 2049, while erasing America’s economic edge and its global hegemony in the bargain.

So, you might ask, have any of those seemingly pie-in-the-sky plans already become an economic reality? Given China’s recent progress in key energy sectors, the answer is a resounding yes.

Under its economic plan, China has already come to dominate the world’s solar power industry. In 2024, it cut the wholesale price of its solar panel exports in half and nearly doubled its exports of panel components. To replace its old export “trio” of clothing, furniture, and appliances, Beijing has mandated a “new trio” of solar panels, lithium batteries, and electric cars. And to put what’s happening in perspective, imagine that, in just the month of May, China installed enough wind and solar energy to power a country as big as Poland, reaching an impressive figure that represents half the world’s “total installed solar capacity.” By 2024, China was already producing at least 80% of the world’s solar panel components, dominating the global market, and undercutting would-be competitors in Europe and the U.S.  Driving all that explosive growth, China’s investment in clean energy has reached nearly $2 trillion, representing 10% of its gross domestic product, and has been growing at three times the rate of its overall economy, meaning it would soon account for a full 20% of its entire economy.

With similar determination, its electric vehicles (EVs) are now beginning to capture the global car market. By 2024, 17.3 million electric cars were made worldwide, and China produced 70% of them. Not only are Chinese companies opening massive robotic assembly plants worldwide to crank out such cars by the millions, but they are also making the world’s cheapest and best cars — with the YangWang U9-X hitting a world speed record of 308 miles per hour; BYD’s latest plug-in hybrid models, priced at only $13,700 and capable of traveling a record 1,200 miles on a single charge and single tank of gas; the YangWang U8 with a capacity to literally drive across water; and the Xiaomi SU-7 displaying a high-tech driver interface that makes a Tesla look like a Ford Pinto.

Since an EV is just a steel box with a battery, technology will soon allow low-cost electric vehicles to completely eradicate gas guzzlers, enabling China to conquer the global car market — with full electric cars like the self-driving BYD Seagull sedan already priced at $8,000, models like BYD’s Han with a 5-minute charge time that’s faster than pumping a tank of gas, and sedans like the Nio ET7 with a standard range on a single charge of 620 miles. And most of that extraordinary technological progress has happened in less than four years, essentially the time remaining in Donald Trump’s second term in office.

An Agenda for America’s Economic Future

By discouraging alternative energy and encouraging fossil fuels, President Trump is undercutting America’s economic competitiveness in the most fundamental way imaginable. Amid an historic transformation in the world’s energy infrastructure (comparable in scope and scale to the coal-fired industrial revolution), the United States will spend the next three years under his watch digging coal and burning oil and natural gas, while the rest of the industrial world follows China as it pursues technological innovation to the furthest frontiers of the human imagination. Indeed, the latest annual report from the world’s energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, states bluntly that the transition away from fossil fuels is “inevitable” as the world, “led by a surge in cheap solar power in… the Middle East and Asia,” installs more green energy capacity in the next five years than it has in the last 40 combined.

By the time Donald Trump leaves office in 2029, this country will be distinctly on the imperial decline amid fast-paced changes that will make electric vehicles universal and solar-powered electricity an economic imperative. And just as the Dutch used energy technology to capture their imperial moment in the seventeenth century, so the Chinese will undoubtedly do the same in this century.

After all, how can the United States produce competitive products, even for domestic consumption (much less export), if our costs for energy, the basic component of every economic activity, become double those of our competitors? Simply put, it won’t be possible.

If, however, when Donald Trump’s term in office is done, this country moves quickly to recover its capacity for economic rationality, it should be able to regain some version of its place in the world economy. For once the United States rejoins the green energy revolution, it can use its formidable engineering ingenuity to accelerate the development of this transformative technology — simultaneously reducing the CO2 emissions that are choking the planet and securing the livelihoods of average American workers in the bargain.

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Lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas; lie down with neocons, you wake up with wars.
–Me

So goes President Trump’s 28 point peace plan to end the Russia/Ukraine war. Revealed at the end of last week, the plan initially received a cautious but cautiously optimistic reception in Moscow.

It was hardly a dramatic tilt toward the Russian position. Many of the plan’s points ranged from the implausible to the bizarre. For example the idea that President Trump would be crowned some sort of “peace czar” overseeing the deal, and that Russia would agree to use its seized assets to rebuild Ukraine. Then there is the one that Russia should accept a demilitarized “buffer” zone taking up a good chunk of Donetsk (which itself would be “de facto” part of Russia but not de jure – and thereby subject to the vicissitudes of Western electoral politics). And of course there was the part where the US would share the “profits” from Russia’s paid reconstruction of Ukraine.

Very Trumpian, very weird.

Nevertheless the flawed plan (in terms of Russian acceptance) dropped like an atom bomb on the US neocons and their European counterparts. Trump’s peace plan was “entirely dictated by Putin,” the UK Independent breathlessly tells us. Yes, that is how propagandistic the western mainstream media really is. And suddenly we are back to Russiagate and accusations the Trump is acting as Putin’s puppet – or at least stenographer.

At the political level, EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas pretty well summed up the level of delusion among the European elite: “We have not heard of any concessions from Russia. If Russia really wanted peace, it could have agreed to an unconditional ceasefire a long time ago.’”

Yes, Kaja “Sun Tzu” Kallas. Military history teaches us that every army making rapid gains on the battlefield periodically pauses to make concessions to the losing side. Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair and not everyone would get a trophy.

President Trump’s demand that Ukraine’s acting president, Zelensky, accept the terms by Thanksgiving or face a cut-off in US military and intelligence assistance put the Europeans and US hawks in panic mode. It appeared Trump was finally tired of playing Hamlet after the framework he presented in Alaska in August was agreed upon by Russia and then abandoned by Trump himself after receiving an earful from said Europeans and US neocons.

This time, by golly, Trump was finally going to step up and end a conflict nearly a year after he promised to end it 24 hours.

And then Rubio walked in.

The one lesson Trump 2.0 did not learn from Trump 1.0 is that the personnel is the policy, particularly with a president who appears uninterested in details and disengaged from complex processes. Trump 1.0 was dragged down by neocon albatrosses John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, among others.

Even a Col. Douglas Macgregor brought in in the 4th quarter at the two minute warning to throw a “Hail Mary” pass to get us out of Afghanistan was tackled behind the line of scrimmage by Robert O’Brien, Trump’s final National Security Advisor and neocon dead-ender.

Neocons are wreckers. That’s the one thing they are good at.

The inclusion of new blood in the person of Vice President Vance ally, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll – who supplanted terminally clueless Trump envoy Keith Kellogg – offered the promise that finally the realist faction in the shadows of the Trump Administration would have their shot.

Then the rug was pulled. Again.

Rubio jetted off to Geneva to help lick the wounds of the European “leaders” who are dedicated to fighting the Russians down to the last Ukrainian.

Politico lets us in on what happened next, in a piece titled, “Rubio changes the tack of Trump’s Ukraine negotiations after week of chaos.”

Before Rubio showed up in Switzerland, it largely felt like Vice President JD Vance, via his close friend Driscoll, was leading the process. By the end of the weekend, Rubio had taken the reins because the conversations became more flexible, the official said.

“Flexibility” means that we are back to square one, with a reversion to the Kellogg/Euro view that the side winning a war should unilaterally freeze military operations in favor of the losing side.

Politico continued:

Rubio’s participation in the talks produced much more American flexibility, the four people familiar with the discussions said. Rubio told reporters on Sunday night that the aim is simply to finalize discussions ‘as soon as possible,’ rather than by Thanksgiving.

That loss of momentum and destruction of the sense of urgency means we have returned to the endless bickering of the eternally deluded voices who even in the face of rapid recent Russian advances believe that Ukraine is winning – or could win with a few hundred billion more dollars – the war against Russia.

Never mind the golden toilets. Suddenly that’s out of the news.

At the end of the day, all the drama changes little. As President Putin himself said while meeting with his own national security council (h/t MoA):

Either Kiev’s leadership lacks objective reporting about the developments on the front, or, even if they receive such information, they are unable to assess it objectively. If Kiev refuses to discuss President Trump’s proposals and declines to engage in dialogue, then both they and their European instigators must understand that what happened in Kupyansk will inevitably occur in other key areas of the front. Perhaps not as quickly as we would prefer, but inevitably.

And overall, this development suits us, as it leads to achieving the goals of the special military operation by force, through armed confrontation.

In other words, Russia is happy to achieve its objectives through negotiation, which would save lives and infrastructure especially in Ukraine. But it is also willing to continue its accelerating push to achieve those objectives militarily. And no fever dreams of war with Russia from the likes of former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen is going to change that.

Marco Rubio is a pretty bad Kissinger, and Kissinger was bad enough. At some point – and that point may have now passed – the Russians are going to rightly conclude that they have no negotiating partner in a US still dominated by people like the former Senator from Florida whose first love is regime change in Venezuela and Cuba.

Whatever the case, Trump should be pretty miffed that Marco threw a spanner in what would have been a world record, unprecedented, universally-praised, like-nothing-the-world-has-ever-seen, solving of NINE wars in just his first year in office!

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

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As a national holiday, Thanksgiving originated as war propaganda.

It was Abe Lincoln in November 1863 who made Thanksgiving a national holiday.  The Union Army under Grant had finally won a battle at Shiloh, and the victory called for celebration.

American Indians, or native Americans as some prefer, give no thanks for the Europeans’ arrival or for Lincoln’s victory over the Confederacy.  No sooner than Sherman and Sheridan had raped and pillaged the Confederacy than they were sicced on the Plains Indians,  Ralph K. Andrist chronicles their extermination in his book, The Long Death:  The Last Days of the Plains Indian.

The invasion of the Confederate States of America by the Union has been incorrectly labeled a “civil war” by court historians.  It is completely clear that there was no civil war.  A civil war is when contesting sides fight for the control of the government.  The Confederacy had its own government in Richmond and no interest in the one in Washington.  It was the North that invaded the South by sending an army into Virginia where the Union army was defeated at the Battle of Bull Run.

I have often wondered how corrupt historians got away with calling a war that began with an invasion of one country by another a “civil war.”

I have also wondered how the same corrupt historians got away with falsely claiming that the war was fought for the purpose of freeing black people from slavery when Abe Lincoln made it completely clear that he initiated the war in order to preserve the union.

I have also wondered how the liberal/left and black studies departments in universities got away with demonizing white Americans for slavery when the greatest casualties in American history were the consequence of a four year war allegedly fought to free black slaves. Altogether 594,000 white men died in a war allegedly fought to free the slaves.  Where, then, does the charge of white racism come from?

I have also wondered why the Union preferred one people of color over another.  Allegedly, the Union suffered 642,427 dead and wounded in a four year effort to free the black slaves, and then immediately on the cessation of the war began with merciless attacks a war on the Plains Indians.

I have also wondered why Lincoln’s army was called the Union Army if it was not fighting to preserve the Union but to free the slaves.  Why wasn’t it called the Black Freedom Army?

The facts are so clear and simple.  Yet they are denied.  Slavery existed for thousands of years prior to the colonization of the New World.  The South did not create slavery.  The South inherited slavery as the agricultural labor force.  The black slaves in America were enslaved by the black king of Dahomey who sold the excess as slaves.  It was the main business of his kingdom.

All races and ethnicities suffered enslavement.  It was President Thomas Jefferson who had to send the US Marines to the Shores of Tripoli in order to stop North Africans from enslaving US citizens.

When one looks at the total mess historians have made of the War of Northern Invasion and slavery, one cannot help being sympathetic with Henry Ford’s dictum that “history is bunk.”

The post Thanksgiving’s Origin as a National Holiday appeared first on LewRockwell.

Given the high visibility of the Israeli genocide being carried out in Gaza, for the first time many among the American general public are beginning to ask why a rich country like Israel should be getting billions of dollars from the United States taxpayer to pay for waging its war when many Americans are struggling. Inevitably, of course, the press coverage of the questions being asked about the cash flow and what is playing out in Gaza have failed to discuss the real magnitude of the “aid,” which go far beyond the $3.8 billion a year that President Barack Obama committed to America’s “best friend and closest ally.” In fact, over the past two years, Washington has given Israel more than $21 billion in weapons and cash and just last week the 1,000th US transport plane filled with weapons landed in Israel. On top of all that, there are trade concessions, co-production “defense partnership” projects and dicey charitable contributions from Zionist billionaires that our federal and many state governments shower on the Jewish state, easily exceeding $10 billion in a “normal” year without Israel claiming having “greater need” as it goes about violating ceasefires and killing Gazans, Lebanese and Iranians.

The fact that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have enabled Israel’s slaughter without so much as the slightest hesitation should in itself be damnable, but the average American is fed a steady diet of propaganda favoring Israel through the devastatingly effective Jewish media control that prevails nationwide. Interestingly, however, as the American public is beginning to tire of the Israeli lies, the Israel Lobby in the US is following the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu, who has declared that his country will be fighting eight wars – seven against all of its neighbors and one to control the United States’ increasingly negative opinion of what Israel represents. As a result, laws like the Antisemitism Awareness Act are being passed to silence “freedom of speech” critics of the Jewish state and criminalize what they are saying.

During his 2016 campaign Donald Trump swore that he would be the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House, a pledge that some viewed skeptically as Trump was also committed to bringing the troops home from “useless wars” in Asia, most of whom were in the Middle East supporting Israeli interests. More recently Trump admitted that America was in the Middle East to “protect Israel” and he has indeed proven to be the great benefactor he promised to be in responding fully to Netanyahu’s wish list. In his first term in office, Trump increased tension dramatically with Iran, moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, and basically gave Israel the green light to do whatever it wants on the Palestinian West Bank, including getting rid of the Palestinians.

And currently as all that has already played out the Israelis have attacked and killed thousands of civilians in Gaza, Syria and the West Bank with impunity, protected by the US veto in the UN Security Council against any consequences for their actions while a subservient Congress gives Netanyahu fifty-six standing ovations and bleats that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Trump has made the United States completely complicit in Israeli war crimes and has added a few unique touches of its own to include the widely condemned assassination of the senior Iranian official Qassem Soleimani while on a peace mission in Baghdad in January 2020.

Israel more-or-less openly admits that it controls the actions of the United States in its region, Netanyahu having boasted how the US federal government is “easily moved” when it comes up against the Israeli Lobby. Nor is there any real secret to how the Lobby uses money to buy access and then exploits that access to obtain real power, which is then used to employ all the resources of the US government in support of the Jewish state. The top donor to the Democratic Party, Israeli-American Haim Saban has stated that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel. This single-minded focus to promote Israel’s interests at the expense of those of the United States makes the Israel Lobby the most formidable foreign policy lobby in Washington.

One of the tools used by Trump to facilitate the virtual slavery under the Israeli yoke is the appointment of passionately Zionist US Ambassadors to Israel, where they often behave as if they are there to represent Jewish interests rather that those of the United States. Trump’s first term appointment David Friedman was a personal lawyer with no diplomatic or international experience, so he inevitably endorsed with some enthusiasm every extreme proposal coming from Netanyahu, which he then went on to sell to Trump. Friedman, now retired, has a home in Jerusalem and has reportedly opted to spend much of his time in Israel.

Friedman was, however, somewhat of a gem compared to the current ambassador Mike Huckabee, an Israel-Firster Baptist preacher from Arkansas, who repeatedly expresses his love for the Jewish state and white-washes whatever it does. For what it’s worth, on October 13th, 2025, Friedman and Huckabee performed a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s hit song Sweet Home Alabama in Jerusalem but with altered lyrics that promoted Zionism and the city of Jerusalem itself. Friedman played guitar while Huckabee played bass. Trump, of course, is similar in his overweening embrace of Israel, whether it be because he is being blackmailed, or honestly believes in what he is saying, or even because he has converted to Judaism in 2017, as some believe. In any event, the theatrical duet performance by the two Israel-loving ambassadors failed to provide any benefit to the United States of America.

The complete contempt that the Israelis and Israeli supporters in the US – to include the Ambassador Huckabee – have for other Americans and their interests has been on full display recently and it involves the most significant espionage operation that Israel has ever “run” inside the United States. Jonathan Pollard, the most damaging spy in American history, stole for Israel the keys to accessing US communications and information gathering systems, which gave the Jewish state access to all US intelligence as it was being collected. He was Jewish and a US citizen, his father a professor at Notre Dame University. As a student at Stanford, where he completed a degree in 1976, Pollard’s penchant for dissimulation was already noted by other students. He is remembered for having boasted that he was a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, claiming to have worked for Mossad, to having attained the rank of Colonel in the Israel Defense Forces (even sending himself a telegram addressed to “Colonel Pollard”), and to having killed an Arab while on guard duty at a kibbutz. All the claims were lies.

Physically Pollard was also unappealing, overweight and balding, seemingly an unlikely candidate to become a US Navy intelligence analyst which he accomplished after having failed a polygraph test when trying to join CIA. One review board determined that he had been hired in the first place under pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). According to an intelligence agency after-the fact-damage assessment “Pollard’s operation has few parallels among known US espionage cases…. his first and possibly largest delivery occurred on 23 January [1984] and consisted of five suitcases-full of classified material.”

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wrote a forty-six page review of the Pollard case that remains largely classified and redacted to this day, detailing what incredible damage Pollard had done. Part of the document states: “In this case, the defendant has admitted passing to his Israeli contacts an incredibly large quantity of classified information. At the outset I must state that the defendant’s disclosures far exceed the limits of any official exchange of intelligence information with Israel. That being the case, the damage to national security was complete the moment the classified information was given over. Ideally, I would detail…all the information passed by the defendant to his Israeli contacts: unfortunately, the volume of .data we know to have been passed is too great to permit that. · Moreover, the defendant admits to having passed to his Israeli handlers a quantity of documents great enough to occupy a space six feet by ten feet… The defendant has substantially harmed the United States, and in my view, his crimes demand severe punishment… My foregoing comments will, I hope, dispel any presumption that disclosures to an ally are insignificant; to the contrary, substantial and irrevocable damage has been done to this nation. Punishment, of course, must be appropriate to the crime, and in my opinion, no crime is more deserving of severe punishment than conducting espionage activities against one’s own country.”

Pollard was detected and arrested in 1985, convicted in 1987, and imprisoned. The case sent shockwaves through both Washington and Tel Aviv at the time of the conviction. Pollard pled guilty, confessing to selling the thousands of pages of secret documents to the Israelis for cash, vacations to Europe, and promised future payments to be wired to a Swiss bank account. A federal judge correctly dismissed pleas for clemency.

In 2015 Pollard was released from prison under parole which required him to remain in the United States. But in January 2021 Pollard was released from the parole conditions and was allowed to fly “home,” meeting Netanyahu as he disembarked from a private plane that had departed from Newark New Jersey before being given a hero’s welcome. The Pollard trip to his “home” occurred because Donald Trump had obligingly lifted the travel restrictions on him the week before, one more favor to Israel, which apparently came about when Huckabee pleaded with Trump to show “mercy.” At the airport, Pollard and his wife knelt to kiss the Israeli soil before Netanyahu handed him an Israeli citizen ID and welcomed him. The 737 luxury-fitted executive jet Pollard and his wife flew on belonged to Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, then the chief donor to the Republicans and to Donald Trump. Adelson was married to an Israeli, Miriam Adelson, who now survives him and continues the donations to the Republicans. Sheldon famously once said that he regretted having worn a US Army uniform when he was drafted in World War 2, much preferring instead that he might have done military service in the Israel Defense Forces.

But the Pollard story does not end there. In July Jonathan Pollard was a guest at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, where he met with Ambassador Mike Huckabee. The meeting was his first with US officials since his release and immigration to Israel. It was a break with precedent and the move by Huckabee, even all these years after the crime, still alarmed American intelligence officials even though, as it was Israel, media coverage in the US was minimal. John Kiriakou, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer, has argued that Pollard should have been detained by the Marine guards at the American Embassy in Jerusalem and should not have been allowed to meet with the ambassador. “[Pollard] has called for Jewish Americans who have security clearances… to begin spying for Israel, just like he did… So for him to be welcomed into the American Embassy is a bridge too far. If anything, he should have been snatched when he entered the American embassy.” Kiriakou also cited an interview Pollard gave to Israeli media while Joe Biden was still in office, urging Israel to “nuke” the United States if Biden were to make any attempt to force Israel to mitigate its slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza. Biden, of course, did no such thing.

The Trump administration was apparently not consulted regarding the planned get-together between Pollard and Huckabee. “The White House was not aware of that meeting,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed. It was reportedly left off the public schedule of the ambassador, suggesting at a minimum that it was a terrible decision by Huckabee acting on his own which he made some attempt to conceal. And yet, when the story broke the Trump administration still condoned the actions of the ambassador, who reportedly had a friendly chat with the spy who had done most grave damage ever to the United States. “The president stands by our ambassador, Mike Huckabee,” Leavitt added, “and all that he’s doing for the United States and Israel.” She did not elaborate on what he has been doing for the United States.

After the story broke, Pollard accused “anti-Israel and isolationist elements within the US government of leaking that he met off-the-books with US Ambassador Huckabee in a bid to discredit and oust the pro-Israel envoy.” He claimed that “The New York Times story was part, or is part, of an effort to discredit the ambassador and have him removed. I think the people behind this are anti-Israel elements within the Trump administration, the neo-isolationists… and others, perhaps pro-Saudi, pro-Qatari elements within the administration that would like to see a person like Ambassador Huckabee sent home.” Pollard later gave an interview in which he named Steven Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as likely culprits “representing Saudi and Qatari rather than US interests” in brokering the Gaza ceasefire, and he added that he “despises them” for daring to “carry on with terrorists.” Pollard added his view that the 20-point ceasefire plan, leaving the door open to the possibility for Palestinian statehood, threatens Israel’s security and “undermines our independence,” and the October 9th truce-hostage deal that is based on that plan would have been worthwhile only had Israel “unleashed… hell on Hamas” following the October 13th release of the last 20 living hostages from Gaza.

Pollard described his meeting with Huckabee as “personal” and “friendly” and confirmed that it was his first meeting with a US government official after his release by Trump from travel restrictions. He concluded that “A lot of people seem to think that I harbor an anger toward the United States, which I don’t. There were specific people that lied about me, that lied about Israel, that tried to use me as a weapon to undermine the US-Israel special relationship, and those are the people I have problems with but certainly people like Ambassador Huckabee, and others, I have absolutely no problem talking to. If I could guess, I would say it’s that community, particularly the CIA station in the embassy, that probably was the one that initiated this whole effort to discredit the ambassador.”

Pollard clearly is promoting a false narrative that makes himself look like some kind of honorable and valiant defender of Israel when in reality he did what he did for the most base of reasons, i.e. for money. Money is indeed how the Israeli boosters in the United States have been able to flat out corrupt America’s political process to attain the dominance that has enabled them to promote the Israeli agenda. They have bought or intimidated every politician that matters to include presidents, congressmen and even those in state and local governments. Anyone who criticizes Israel or Jewish collective behavior in support of the Israeli state is subject to character assassination and blacklisting a la Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tom Massie. Those who persist are denounced as anti-Semites, a label that is used liberally by Zionist groups. Now Pollard is portraying himself as some kind of Israeli hero. The end result is that when Israel kills civilians in violation of a ceasefire in Gaza and is allowing rampaging armed settlers to destroy Palestinian livelihoods the United States government chooses to look the other way and instead showers the rogue state with money so it can continue to do its dirty work. Providing that political cover for Israel is in part the real dark side of Huckabee’s job as he sees it, not to engage over real American interests.

And then there are the hot buttons a-la the lies about Israel being advanced by Pollard and his ilk which, if the US actually had a functional government that is responsive to the people, should have been pushed long ago. “Best friend” Israel is ranked by the FBI as the number one “friendly” country in terms of its spying against the United States. Pollard is an exception who was actually punished since his crime was so dramatic and damaging, but Israeli spies are routinely slapped on the wrist when caught and never face prosecution for that crime, as one might note in the current “investigation” of Jeffrey Epstein, which was undoubtedly a major MOSSAD intelligence operation.

And there are also the MOSSAD agents who were the “Dancing Shlomos,” celebrating while the twin towers went down on 9/11, who were allowed to go home and various assassinations including JFK and even Charlie Kirk that have an Israeli back story. And Israel has never truly paid any price for the horrific bombing and torpedoing of the USS Liberty fifty-eight years ago, which killed 34 Americans and injured over one hundred and seventy more. The completely unprovoked attack took place in international waters and was later covered-up by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Congress. May they burn in hell. The few remaining surviving crew members are still waiting for justice.

Good riddance to scum like Jonathan Pollard and the Israel-Firsters who enable him. It is reported in Israel that Pollard is now preparing to run for the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which explains his demeanor and phony narrative. It also all means that it is past time to get rid of folks like Ambassador Mike Huckabee who prefer to advance Israeli interests rather than those of his own country because, he believes, God is telling him to do so. More generally speaking, it is well past time to get rid of the special relationship with Israel, sanctified in the halls of Congress and by a Jewish dominated media, which does nothing good for the United States and for the American people. Israel’s constant interference in the US political system and economy comes at a huge cost, both in dollars and in terms of actual American interests.

So, let’s all resolve for 2026 to do whatever we can to pull the plug on Israel. Let Israel, which is now seeking a 20 year commitment of even more cash annually from the US taxpayer, pay its own bills and take care of its own defense. American citizens who prefer the Jewish ethno-religious state to our constitutional republic should feel free to emigrate. In fact, they should be encouraged to leave. Lacking Washington’s backing, Israel will also be free to commit atrocities and war crimes against all of its neighbors but without the US United Nations veto it will have to begin facing the consequences for its actions. But most of all, as Americans, we will no longer have to continue to carry the burden of a country that manipulates and uses us and also has a certain contempt for us while doing so, witness how Trump’s kid-glove handling of Jonathan Pollard has played out. And maybe just maybe freeing the United States from Israel could lead to an end to all the wars in the Middle East that Washington has been waging in spite of the fact that we Americans are threatened by no one in the region and have no real interest whatsoever in prolonging the agony of staying engaged there.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The post Ambassador Mike Huckabee Secretly Meets Top Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard appeared first on LewRockwell.

Looking back on the the Schleswig-Holstein wars in the mid 19th century, Lord Palmerston quipped:

The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.

Palmerston was making a joke of the fact that in many of Europe’s conflicts, the belligerents don’t understand what they are fighting about.

Britain, France, and Germany have never understood Russia, and their policies towards Russia have always been bloody-minded, murderous, and stupid. Consider that the rationale for the Crimean War (1853-56) was to reduce Russia’s growing influence within a region that had long been controlled by the Ottoman Empire. In other words, the geniuses in London preferred the weak rule of Ottoman slave traders in the Black Sea to that of the Christian Czar Nicholas I.

In 1812, Napoleon’s advisor, Armand-Augustin-Louis de Caulaincourt, as well as his ex-wife Josephine (whose counsel he had usually valued) begged him not to invade Russia, but he refused to listen to them.

Because of his obstinate pride, he failed to recognize the obvious trap that Russian commander General Mikhail Kutuzov set for him—namely, that of strategic retreat deep into Russia with winter setting in, thereby overextending the French supply lines and letting the Russian winter do most of the grim work on French soldiers.

After declaring war on Russia in August 1914, Germany and Austro-Hungary established the Eastern Front in the Austrian territorial possession of Galicia, which is now part of western Ukraine. In June 1916, the Russian Army launched the Brusilov offensive, inflicting approximately one million casualties on the German and Austrian armies. I suspect that few if any members of the E.U. Parliament even know about the Brusilov offensive.

In 1941, intoxicated by his easy victory in France, Hitler decided to launch Operation Barbarossa, thereby committing the German Army to the same misery the French had suffered in 1812. German Chief of Staff, Franz Halder, strongly advised him against it, but the “Little Corporal from Austria” refused to listen to him.

Now we come to Ursula von der Leyen’s Nov. 25, 2025 speech before the EU Parliament in Strasbourg, which may be the most nonsensical address ever uttered in the history of Europe.

Ursula’s paternal line is from the Electorate of Hanover, whose House of Hanover produced Mad King George III and his imbecilic sons George IV and “Silly Billy” King William IV.

Ursula is able to persist in making ruinous decisions for Europe because she is never held accountable for any of them. During the pandemic she had private discussions by text message with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla (see Did Ursula von der Leyen & Albert Bourla Mix Business with Pleasure?) to poison all of Europe with his mRNA shot. To this day, she has never been compelled to disclose these messages to the public. She also recently Likened Free Speech to an Infectious Disease.

Now she wants to keep the war going in Ukraine and to continue sending EU taxpayer money to the corrupt, larcenist, money-laundering dictatorship in Kiev.

President Trump should tell her that it is simply not in the interest of the United States to keep this war going with Russia, and that he and he alone is going to negotiate with the Russians to end it.

While he’s at it, he should remind dunderhead Chancellor Merz that the U.S. still has 35,000 armed men stationed in Germany to prevent its government from doing stupid things like starting another war with Russia.

Increasingly, it seems to me that Europe’s “leaders”—Starmer, Macron, Merz, and von der Leyen—perceive that they need to keep the war with Russia going for their own political survival.

I wonder if they are afraid that—if the Zelensky regime collapses and Zelensky is obliged to join his “wallet,” Timur Mindich, in fleeing to Israel—the precise mechanics of their participation in this monstrously corrupt enterprise will be revealed.

The reality of the war in Ukraine is that Russia was deliberately and systematically baited into launching its military operation. The purpose of this Russian Bear Baiting was to bleed Russia and to provide Western “leaders” with a pretext for:

1). Diverting attention from the COVID-19 fiasco that they themselves created.

2). Destroying the Nord Stream Pipeline to promote the U.S. LNG industry.

3). Looting their treasuries and enriching their cronies in the military-industrial complex.

4). Destroying Russia, whose increasing power as an independent nation state has long been a matter of sore resentment for the Satanic globalists who wish to acquire dominion over the entire earth.

5). Seizing Russian mineral assets to collateralize another round of enormous credit expansion in the West, whose governments are now insolvent.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Ursula von der Leyen is Completely Dissociated From Reality appeared first on LewRockwell.

For those of us who have lived through past recessions, this latest development comes as no surprise: as the US economy worsens, we’re now being told that consumers are hurting the economy because they are saving too much money.

This is a pretty common trope among the regime economists whose job it is—apparently—to incessantly harangue the American consumer into spending every last dime he has on corporate America’s trinkets. After all, if the consumer saves “too much” money this will send the US economy into a liquidity trap. At least, that’s how the official narrative goes.

Regular readers of mises.org won’t be shocked to hear that the alleged liquidity trap isn’t real, and it’s not at all a problem if consumers save money rather than spend it. After all, real economic progress depends on a sustainable foundation of saving and investment, and not on consumers frittering away their retirements on another round of luxury cars and Caribbean cruises.

Back in 2001 in the days of the dot-com bust, then-vice president Dick Cheney said that Americans who were falling on hard times ought to “support the troops”—remember that worthless propaganda phrase?—by spending more money on retail goods. If you saved your money, then the terrorists won.

As the 2008 recession got underway the story was the same, but with less jingoism. Paul Krugman, for example, promulgated the usual Keynesian gospel with an article titled “When Consumers Capitulate“ and explained how saving is a bad thing because “individual virtue can be public vice” and “attempts by consumers to do the right thing by saving more can leave everyone worse off.”

In other words, saving money will backfire so you’re hurting America by spending less.

So, just as we might look for daffodils to emerge from the snow as a sign of the coming spring, we look for signs of a worsening economy in the form of patronizing columns telling consumers that they’re not spending enough money.

Perhaps the earliest sign of this phenomenon in the current cycle was April’s Wall Street Journal article—titled “Your New Lunch Habit Is Hurting the Economy“—lecturing consumers for brown-bagging their lunches. But it certainly didn’t end there. In a Sunday column for CNBC, Kevin Williams trots out the creaky old Krugmanian “arguments” and wrings his hands over the fact that Americans aren’t spending as much money on smartphones, and that it’s “costing the economy.” He writes:

If you are holding onto your aging printer or cracked smartphone longer than you had planned, you are not alone. …

The average American now holds onto their [sic] smartphone for 29 months … and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.

While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run…

How exactly is it “costing” the economy? Well, it seems that if you’re not spending every last nickel on a new iPhone—remember, they don’t make pennies anymore, thanks to inflation—then you are losing milliseconds of lost “productivity.” The solution? Go further into debt for a $900 phone so that you can more quickly stay up to date on AI-created cat videos.

The economics “experts” tell us that if you’re saving your money instead of buying more “efficient” tech, then you’re not an optimal cog in the machine of the corporate tax farm we call “the United States.”

Of course, one may ask, how do the “experts” know if I’m better off buying a new phone, or if I’m better off saving that money for other priorities? How do they know if it’s more “efficient” for me to spend my money on a phone now, rather than on, say, tuition for my child’s education? The answer is they don’t have a clue what makes any consumer better off.  The usual media-quoted economists only claim to know these things because they have been trained to mindlessly come up with new reasons as to why it’s always better for regular people to spend as much money as possible, at all times.

Again, this new call to buy newer smart phones is just the first sign of what is to come, as it becomes increasingly clear that consumers are tapped out. The early signs are there, such as rising delinquency rates for automobiles and credit cards. Hiring is essentially flat, and the unemployment rate is rising, even as immigrants self-deport by the hundreds of thousands. October foreclosures were up, year over year, by 32 percent.

We can expect more articles like this CNBC column moving foreword, with “warnings” about how consumers should spend more or else fall prey to the savings-induced evils of “inefficiency” or even outright recession.

Now is a good time to remind ourselves, though, of why these calls for maximum and immediate spending get it wrong. They key to economic growth has never been spending as much money as possible on existing products and services right now. Rather, a vibrant economy can come from saving and investment which will turn become essential capital that is transformed into productive enterprises in the future.  

That is, a better economy in the future requires saving and investment now. There is no need to worry about the consumers saving their money “too much.” Bob Murphy explains:

[I]t will be useful to spell out exactly what happens in a market economy when consumers decide to save more of their income. The first thing to realize is that people do not decide to “spend” or not; rather, they decide whether to spend in the present versus in the future. For example, imagine that thousands of couples in a large city one day decide to skip their weekly restaurant outings in order to save up for a summer cruise. At first, it seems that this would hurt the economy. After all, local restaurants see their sales drop, and so they buy fewer items from their suppliers and lay off some workers. The suppliers and workers in turn have less income to spend, and so sales are hurt elsewhere too.

However, so long as the entrepreneurs involved in the cruise industry anticipate the eventual increase in demand for their services, they will exactly offset the above effects when they hire more workers and other items in preparation for the busy summer months. The new savings (which were previously spent on restaurants) drives down interest rates, perhaps allowing the cruise operators to borrow money and pay for an additional liner. Thus the decision to save more doesn’t reduce total income or employment, once everyone adjusts to the new spending patterns. It is really no different from a scenario where thousands of people become health conscious and decide to spend their money on vegetables rather than fast food.

CNBC would have you believe “the economy” suffers when we don’t buy more new phones. In reality, it’s just iPhone sellers who suffer. The economy and Apple are not the same thing.

In any case, no consumers should ever allow himself to be convinced that he hurts either himself of “the economy” by saving money. Lew Rockwell notes:

But this also defies everything we know about family finance. The path to a secure prosperity is delaying consumption. One should spend as little as possible and save as much as possible for the future, and let that money be used in the service of investments that yield a solid rate of return. Those who have chosen a different path now see the folly: they are being burned in the soft housing market, for example.

The lesson is also true for the nation at large, because the logic doesn’t magically change when moving from the family budget to the national stage. Just because something involves “macroeconomics” doesn’t mean that we should throw out all good sense. But that is precisely what people have done with regard to the economy, since J.M. Keynes somehow convinced the world that up is down and left is right.

In a recession or a crisis, the right approach for individuals is to save. So too for the national economy. A looming recession will prompt a pullback in consumer spending as a rational response to the perception of economic troubles. This action does not cause the economy to fall into recession any more than more spending can save it from recession. The downturn is a fact that cannot be avoided. We don’t blame umbrellas for floods, and, in the same way, we shouldn’t blame tightfisted consumers for recessions.

So, there is no liquidity trap and saving doesn’t cause recessions and we can safely ignore all the future media articles about how saving money is bad news for the economy.

The post We’re Approaching the ‘Blame the Consumer’ Stage of the Boom-Bust Cycle appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Johnny Kramer.

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Writes Eric Zuesse:

The economic genius Yanis Varoufakis tallies it all up in this extraordinary 27-minute talk:

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John Leo Keenan wrote:

I felt the doctor was too strong in this title, that it’s not so for Mises, whom Dr. Njoya quotes to back this title up.  In the quote she gives of him, it’s implicit that Mises grants History is a science in its own right.  Her Mises quote says the following, and I highlight the implied definition of history as being a science:

“This is not a field for understanding. It is a task to be accomplished by the employment of the tools provided by all nonhistorical sciences. The phenomena are gathered by cautious critical observation of the records available.… What a historian asserts is either correct or contrary to fact, is either proved or disproved by the documents available, or vague because the sources do not provide us with sufficient information. The experts may disagree, but only on the ground of a reasonable interpretation of the evidence available.”

If history weren’t a science to him, he would have written “by all sciences,” “the sciences” or something like that.  He implies there that history is a science to him.  It’s something to improve on that she doesn’t see the fact in the quote.  Without critical thinking we’re done for (as simple as that in my opinion).  She should check Google AI for this.  (It knows more than Njoya about Mises.)  I asked it, “did Ludwig von Mises think history is a science too and do we have a quote about it?”  It answered what I remembered about Mises (not as categorically), that he believed it’s “one of the two sciences of human action.”  She should not have used him to back up her title because it’s not so.  The correctness of AI Overview’s answer is also history and science, and in the last quote it gives at the end, the point of history being a science of human action is implied more heavily than in her quote.  Google’s AI Overview (copied and pasted):

“Ludwig von Mises did not consider history to be a science in the same way that he defined the theoretical, a priori science of human action, praxeology. Mises viewed history as one of the two sciences of human action, but he drew a sharp distinction in their logical character and methods. 

Mises’s View of History and Science

• History as a Science of the Past: Mises defined history as an empirical science of the past, dealing with unique, unrepeatable events and their concrete causes and effects. Its purpose is to understand the specific meaning and motivations behind individual human actions in a given context (a task Mises associated with a branch of history he called “thymology”).
• Praxeology as the A Priori Science: In contrast, Mises developed praxeology (of which economics is a part) as a theoretical, a priori science that uses deductive reasoning from the fundamental axiom of human action. Praxeology aims to discover universally valid laws and principles that are not derived from or falsifiable by historical experience.
• Distinction from the Natural Sciences: Mises argued that the methods of the natural sciences (like laboratory experiments and induction to find general laws) cannot be applied to human behavior because human action involves conscious choice and meaning, which are not present in the physical world. 

Relevant Quote

While Mises did not provide a single, widely circulated quote that “history is a science,” he made numerous statements highlighting the limitations of history in generating universal laws, contrasting it with praxeology. 

A key quote from his work Theory and History that encapsulates his view on what history can and cannot teach us is:

“If historical experience could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.” 

However, a more direct quote regarding the methodological limitations of history in a scientific context is:

“History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law”.

He further clarified the nature of praxeology (and thus, how it differs from history) with this quote: 

“Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts.” 

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