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Progressives, it seems, have always been obsessed with racial biological collectivism. Whether it was Progressives in the early 20th Century during the so-called Progressive Era (1900-1920) and their mania for eugenics, scientific racism, and race suicide; or today’s Progressives, equally obsessed with identity politics; race, class, gender and queer studies; and intersectionality.

The Progressive Era was a crucial time in American intellectual history. Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard T. Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during this period, dominated by the rise of Bismarck’s welfare-warfare state. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality. This worship of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism, ”social imperialism,” Fabian socialism imported from Great Britain, the increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism, all provided the satanic breeding ground for the incubus that emerged as progressivism – complete with its elite notions of centralized political/economic planning, aggressive nationalism, eugenics and the idea of “race suicide. It is a seminal focus of their skewed, maniacal totalitarian world view. Progressives have always insisted upon rule by an elitist professional class of credentialed experts removed from the populist majority of everyday Americans, who they regarded as “deplorables,” “white trash,” or “the unwashed masses.”

Here are some intellectual resources which tell the nefarious backstory:

The Eugenics Crusade

Eugenics in High School History: Failure to Confront the Past  by Thomas F. Cargill

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine

Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, by Charles Benedict Davenport

The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant

The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, by Lothrop. Stoddard

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, by Christine Rosen

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard

Liberal Fascism: the Secret History of the American left, from Mussolini to the politics of change, by Jonah Goldberg

For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene, by Stefan Kühl

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, by Stefan Kühl

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Q. Whitman

The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D’Souza

Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor

Hitler is Winning: How Hitler’s Plan For A Master Race Was Created By The West And Is Being Implemented Today, by Jerry Leonard

The post Progressivism = Racial Biological Collectivism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

Information Liberation

 

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LIBERA NOS A MALO
Considerations on the Great Reset and the New World Order

No one will be part of the New World Order
unless he carries out an act of worship to Lucifer.
No one will enter the New Age unless he receives Luciferian initiation.

David Spangler
Director of the United Nations Planetary Initiative Project
(Reflections on The Christ, Findhorn, 1978.

For more than a year and a half we have been helplessly witnessing the succession of incongruent events to which most of us are unable to give a plausible justification.

The pandemic emergency has made particularly evident the contradictions and illogicalities of measures nominally intended to limit contagion – lockdowns, curfews, closures of commercial activities, limitations of public services and classes, suspension of citizens’ rights – but which are disavowed daily by conflicting voices, by clear evidence of ineffectiveness, by contradictions on the part of the same health authorities. There is no need to list the measures that almost all the governments of the world have taken without achieving the promised results. If we limit ourselves to the presumed advantages that the experimental gene serum should have brought to the community – above all immunity to the virus and renewed freedom of movement – we discover that an Oxford University study published in The Lancet stated that the viral load of those vaccinated with a double dose is 251 times greater than the first strains of the virus, despite the proclamations of world leaders, starting with the Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, according to whom “whoever gets vaccinated lives, whoever does not get the vaccine dies.” The side effects of the gene serum, cleverly disguised or deliberately not registered by the national health authorities, seem to confirm the danger of taking the vaccine and the disturbing unknowns for the health of citizens, which we will soon have to face.

From science to scientism

The art of medicine – which is not science, but the application of scientific principles to different cases each time, on an experiential and experimental basis – seems to have renounced its prudence, in the name of an emergency that has risen to the level of priesthood of a religion – the religion of science, in fact – which in order to be such has cloaked itself in a dogmatism bordering on superstition. The ministers of this cult have constituted themselves as a caste of untouchables, exempt from any criticism even when their claims are denied by the evidence of the facts. The principles of medicine, considered universally valid until February 2020, have given way to improvisation, to the point of being advised to vaccinate at the height of the pandemic, the obligation of masks being imposed although they are useless, the arbitrary mandating of bizarre distances, the prohibition of treatments with effective drugs and the imposition of experimental gene therapies in violation of normal safety protocols. And just as there are new Covid priests, so there are also new heretics, that is, those who reject the new pandemic religion and want to remain faithful to the Hippocratic Oath. Not infrequently, the aura of infallibility that surrounds virologists and other more or less titled scientists does not seem to be questioned due to their conflicts of interest or by the substantial financial benefits received by pharmaceutical companies, which under normal conditions would be scandalous and criminal.

What many fail to understand is the inconsistency between the stated aims and the means that are adopted in a constantly changing manner in order to achieve them. If in Sweden the absence of lockdowns and masks did not lead to higher infection rates than those in countries where people have been confined to their homes or where they have had masks put on even in primary schools, this element is not considered as proof of ineffectiveness of the measures. If in Israel or in Great Britain mass vaccination has increased infections and made them more virulent, their example does not induce the rulers of other countries to be cautious in the vaccination campaign, but rather pushes them to evaluate the mandatory nature of their giving of the vaccine. If ivermectin or hyperimmune plasma prove to be valid treatments, this is not enough to authorize them, let alone recommend them. And those who wonder the reason for this disconcerting irrationality end up refraining from judgment, giving a sort of fideistic acceptance to the pronouncements of the Covid priests, or conversely considering doctors as unreliable sorcerers.

A single script under a single direction

As I said earlier, we are faced with a colossal deception, based on lies and fraud. This deception starts from the premise that the justifications put forward by the authorities in support of their actions are sincere. More simply, the mistake consists in believing that the rulers are honest and in assuming that they do not lie to us. So we persist in finding more or less plausible justifications, with the sole purpose of not recognizing that we are the object of a conspiracy planned to the smallest detail. And while we try to rationally explain irrational behavior, while we attribute logic to the illogical actions of those who govern us, cognitive dissonance leads us to close our eyes to reality and to believe the most shameless lies.

We should have understood – I wrote it some time ago – that the Great Reset plan was not the result of the ravings of some “conspiracy theorist” but the crude evidence of a criminal plan, conceived for decades and aimed at establishing a universal dictatorship in which a minority of immeasurably rich and powerful people intends to enslave and subjugate the whole of humanity to the globalist ideology. The accusation of “conspiracy theory” could perhaps have made sense when the conspiracy was not yet evident, but today denying what the elite has planned since the 1950s is unjustifiable. What Kalergi, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Klaus Schwab, Jacques Attali and Bill Gates have been saying since World War II has been published in books and newspapers, commented on and taken up by international bodies and foundations, made up precisely by parties and government majorities. The United States of Europe, uncontrolled immigration, the reduction of wages, the cancellation of trade union guarantees, the renunciation of national sovereignty, the single currency, the control of citizens under the pretext of a pandemic, and the reduction of the population through the use of vaccines with new technologies are not recent inventions, but the result of a planned, organized and coordinated action – an action that clearly shows itself perfectly adhering to a single script under a single direction.

The criminal mens

Once it is understood that the present events have been intended in order to obtain certain results – and consequently to pursue certain interests on behalf of a minority part of humanity, with incalculable harm for the majority – we must also have the honesty to recognize the criminal mens [mind] of the authors of this plan. This criminal design also makes us understand the fraud perpetrated by civil authority in presenting certain measures as an unavoidable response to unpredictable events, when the events have been artfully created and magnified with the sole purpose of legitimizing a revolution – which Schwab identifies as the fourth industrial revolution – intended by the elite to the detriment of all humanity. The enslavement of authority is on the other hand the result of a process that began even earlier, with the French Revolution, and which made the political class the servant not of God (whose Lordship it disdainfully disregards) nor of the sovereign people (which it despises and uses only to legitimize itself), but of the economic and financial potentates, of the international oligarchy of bankers and usurers, of multinationals and pharmaceutical companies. In reality, on closer inspection, all these subjects belong to a small number of well-known very rich families.

Equal enslavement is also evident in the media: journalists have accepted – without any scruple of conscience – prostituting themselves to the powerful, going so far as to censor the truth and spread shameless lies without even trying to give them the appearance of credibility. Up until last year journalists counted the numbers of the “victims” of Covid by presenting anyone who tested positive as terminally ill; today those who die after being vaccinated are always and only taken by a vague “illness,” and even before the post mortem examinations, they officially decide that there is no correlation between a person’s death and the administration of the gene serum. They twist the truth with impunity when it does not confirm their narrative, bending it to fit their purposes.

What has been happening for a year and a half had been widely announced, down to the smallest detail, by the creators of the Great Reset themselves; just as we were told the measures that would be adopted. On February 17, 1950, testifying before the United States Senate, the well-known banker James Warburg said,

“We will have a world government, whether you like it or not. The only question that arises is whether this world government will be established by consensus or by force.”

Four years later, the Bilderberg Group was born, which has counted among its members characters such as [Italian businessman Gianni] Agnelli, Henry Kissinger, Mario Monti, and the current Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. In 1991, David Rockefeller wrote:

“The world is ready for a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is certainly preferable to the national self-determination practiced in past centuries.”

And he added: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the ‘right’ global crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.” Today we can affirm that this “right crisis” coincides with the pandemic emergency and with the “lockstep” outlined since 2010 by the Rockefeller Foundation document “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” in which the events we are now witnessing are all anticipated.

In short, they have created a false problem in order to be able to impose population control measures as an apparent solution, cancel small and medium-sized businesses with lockdowns and the green pass to the benefit of a few international groups, demolish education by imposing distance learning, lower the cost of manpower and employees with “smart working,” privatize public health for the benefit of Big Pharma, and allow governments to use the state of emergency to legislate in derogation of the law and impose so-called vaccines on the entire population, making citizens traceable in all their movements and either chronically ill or sterile.

Everything the elite wanted to do, they have done. And what is incomprehensible is that in the face of the evidence of the premeditation of this terrible crime against humanity, which sees the leaders of almost the whole world as accomplices and traitors, there is not a single magistrate who opens a file against them to ascertain the truth and condemn the guilty and complicit. Those who disagree are not only censored but pointed out as public enemies, as infectors, as non-persons for whom no rights are recognized.

Deep state and deep church

Now, in the face of a criminal plan, it would be at least logical to denounce it and make it known, in order to then be able to avert it and try those who are guilty. The list of traitors should start with the heads of government, with cabinet members and elected officials, and then continue with the virologists and corrupt doctors, the complicit officials, the leaders of the armed forces incapable of opposing the violation of the Constitution, the sold-out journalists, the cowardly judges and the obsequious unions. In that long list that will perhaps be drawn up one day, the leaders of the Catholic Church should also be listed, starting with Bergoglio and not a few of the Bishops, who have become zealous executors of the will of the prince against the mandate received from Christ. And certainly, in that list, one would know the extent of the conspiracy and the number of the conspirators, confirming the crisis of authority and the perversion of civil and religious power. In short, it would be understood that the corrupt part of the civil authority – the deep state – and the corrupt part of ecclesiastical authority – the deep church – are two sides of the same coin, both instrumental to the establishment of the New World Order.

However, in order to understand this alliance between civil and religious power, it is necessary to recognize the spiritual and eschatological dimension of the present conflict, framing it in the context of the war that Lucifer, ever since his fall, has waged against God. This war, whose outcomes have been decided ab æterno with the inexorable defeat of Satan and the Antichrist and the overwhelming victory of the Woman encircled with the stars, is now approaching its conclusion. This is why the forces of darkness are so wild at present, so impatient to cancel the name of Our Lord from the earth, to not only destroy his tangible presence in our cities by tearing down churches, demolishing crosses, and suppressing Christian holidays; but also by eliminating memory, cancelling Christian civilization, adulterating its teaching, and debasing its worship. And in order to do this, the presence of a faithful and courageous Hierarchy, ready to suffer martyrdom in order to defend Christian faith and moral teaching, is certainly an obstacle. This is why, from the very initial phase of the globalist plan, it was essential to corrupt the Hierarchy in morals and doctrine, to infiltrate it with fifth columns and sleeper cells, to deprive it of any supernatural yearning, and to make it vulnerable to blackmail thanks to financial and sexual scandals; all with the purpose of excluding it and eliminating it once its purpose has been achieved, according to established practice.

This infiltration operation began at the end of the 1950’s, when the project of the New World Order was just taking shape. It began its own work of subversion a few years later, with the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, in view of which the election of Roncalli and the expulsion of Cardinal Siri, Pacelli’s “dauphin” or probable successor as pope, represented a reason for enthusiasm both for the progressive and modernist element within the Church, as well as for the communist, liberal, and Masonic element of the civil world. Vatican II represented within the ecclesial body what the Tennis Court Oath [of the French Revolution] was for civil society: the beginning of the Revolution. And if on many occasions I have drawn attention to the subversive nature of the Council, today I believe that a historical analysis deserves attention in which apparently disconnected facts acquire a disturbing significance, explaining many things.

Liaisons dangereuses

As Michael J. Matt has reported in a recent video at The Remnant, today we are beginning to put together all the pieces of the mosaic, and we discover – by the very admission of one of the protagonists – that Msgr. Hélder Câmara, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, had a meeting in those years with the young Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum and theorizer of the Great Reset. Once Schwab recognized Câmara for his opposition to the traditional Church and his revolutionary and pauperist theories, he invited him to the Davos Forum, considering his participation in this event as extremely important in view of the project of the New Order. We know that Hélder Câmara was among the organizers of the “Pact of the Catacombs,” which was signed by about forty ultra-progressivist Bishops on 16 November 1965, a few days before the closing of the Council. Among the heretical theses of that document, there is also collaboration in the establishment of “another, new social order”, n. 9) based on justice and equality. And we are not surprised to learn that among the signatories there was also Msgr. Enrique Angelelli, the auxiliary bishop of Cordoba in Argentina, “[a] point of reference for then-Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio”. Bergoglio himself declared right from the beginning of his Pontificate that he agreed with the demands of the Pact of the Catacombs. On 20 October 2019, during the Synod on the Amazon, the celebration of the pact between the conspirators was repeated in the Catacombs of Santa Domitilla, confirming that the plan begun at the Council had found fulfillment precisely in Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Far from distancing himself from the ultra-progressivists who support him and who determined his election at the last Conclave, Bergoglio never misses an opportunity to give proof of his perfect coherence with the plan of the New World Order, beginning with the collaboration of Vatican commissions and dicasteries with environmentalism of a Malthusian matrix and their participation in the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a global alliance with the Rothschilds, the Rockefeller Foundation, and large banks. So on the one hand we have David Rockefeller with the Trilateral Commission, and on the other we have Klaus Schwab, who is related by marriage with the Rothschilds (here), with the World Economic Forum, and both of them are arm-in-arm with the head of the Catholic Church to establish the New Order by means of the Great Reset, as has been planned since the 1950’s.

The world depopulation plan 

Among the associates of this pactum sceleris there must also be counted some members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which recently had its organizational structure overturned by Bergoglio himself when he removed the members who were most faithful to the Magisterium, replacing them with supporters of depopulation, contraception, and abortion. There should be no surprise at the Holy See’s support for vaccines: in June 2011 the Sovereign Independent carried the headline on its front page: “Depopulation Through Forced Vaccination: The Zero Carbon Solution!” (here). Beside the headline, a photograph of Bill Gates was accompanied by a quote from him: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive services [abortion and contraception], we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” This is what Bill Gates said eleven years ago. Today he is one of the shareholders of the Black Rock group that finances the pharmaceutical companies that produce the vaccines, one of the main sponsors of the World Health Organization (WHO), and also of a myriad of public and private entities connected to health. At his side we curiously find George Soros, the “philanthropist” of the Open Society, which together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently invested in a British company that produces swabs for Covid testing. And since we are talking about economic issues, I would like to recall that the Holy See has held shares worth about €20 million in two pharmaceutical companies that have produced a contraceptive drug, and more recently it invested in a fund that guaranteed very high profits in the event of a geopolitical or pandemic crisis thanks to speculation on international currencies, the “Geo-Risk” fund managed by the Merrill Lynch investment bank, which had to close it because of its skyrocketing yields after the first few months of the pandemic. Other capital, coming from the “Peter’s Pence” collection, had been used to finance various other initiatives, even collaborating with [Italian businessman] Lapo Elkann, whose endeavors include Rocketman, the autobiographical film of Elton John. To say nothing of the real estate speculations and the purchase of the London building at 60 Sloane Avenue that the news coverage has amply informed us on, a purchase that I know, from a reliable source, was decided on by Bergoglio himself. And then there’s China: always in the name of “coherence” and the “church of the poor for the poor” that is so dear to Bergoglio’s heart, there are those who believe that the secret Accord prepared by the Jesuits and former-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick may have obtained substantial funding from the communist regime in Beijing in exchange for the Vatican’s silence over the persecution of Catholics and the violation of human rights.

Deep state interference 

There have been manifold examples of interference by the deep state in the life of the Church. We cannot forget the emails of John Podesta and Hillary Clinton, which show the intention to oust Benedict XVI from the papacy and so to initiate a new “springtime of the Church” that would be progressivist and globalist, which later came about with the resignation of Benedict and the election of the Argentine. Nor can we overlook the interference of entities and institutions that are anything but close to religion, such as the B’nai B’rith, in dictating the direction of the “renewal” of the Church after Vatican II and most of all under this Pontificate. Finally, we should remember on the one hand the disdainful refusals to grant audiences to conservative political and institutional personalities, and on the other hand the passionate smiling encounters with leaders of the Left and of progressivism, along with expressions of enthusiastic satisfaction on the occasion of their election. Many of them owe their success to having attended universities run by the Society of Jesus or circles of Catholicism that in Italy would be called Dossettian,1 where the network of social and political relations constitutes a sort of progressive Freemasonry and ensures dazzling careers for so-called “adult Catholics,” those who use the name “Christian” without behaving consistently with Christian faith and morality in their service of public affairs: Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi; Romano Prodi, Mario Monti, Giuseppe Conte, and Mario Draghi; to name only a few. As we can see, the cooperation between the deep state and deep church is long-standing and has now produced the results hoped for by its supporters, with very serious damage to both the State and religion.

The closure of churches in early 2020, even before the civil authorities imposed the lockdowns; the prohibition of the celebration of Masses and the administration of the Sacraments during the pandemic emergency; the grotesque ceremony performed on 27 March 2020 in Saint Peter’s Square; the insistence on vaccines and their promotion as morally legitimate despite having been produced with cell lines originating with aborted fetuses; Bergoglio’s declarations that the genetic serum represents a “moral duty” for every Christian; the introduction of the “Green Pass” health passport in the Vatican and more recently in Catholic schools and in some seminaries; the Holy See prohibiting Bishops from announcing that they are against the vaccination obligation, promptly endorsed by certain Bishops’ Conferences – these are all elements that demonstrate the subordination of the deep church to the orders of the deep state, and the way in which the Bergoglian church is an integral part of the globalist plan. If we combine all this with the idolatrous cult of the pachamama right under the arches of Saint Peter’s Basilica; the insistence on irenicist ecumenism, pacifism, and pauperism; the endorsement of situation ethics and the substantial legitimization of adultery and concubinage in Amoris Laetitia; the declaration that the death penalty is morally illicit; the endorsement of left-wing politicians, revolutionary leaders, and abortion activists; the words of understanding for LGBT issues, homosexuals, and transsexuals; the silence over the legitimization of homosexual unions and the even more disconcerting silence over the blessing of sodomitical couples by German Bishops and priests; and the prohibition of the Tridentine Mass with the abolition of Benedict XVI’s Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, we realize that Jorge Mario Bergoglio is carrying out the task entrusted to him by the globalist elite, which wants him to be the liquidator of the Catholic Church and the founder of a philanthropic and ecumenical sect of Masonic inspiration that is meant to constitute the Universal Religion in support of the New Order. Whether this action is being carried out with full awareness, out of fear, or under blackmail, nothing detracts from the gravity of what is happening, nor from the moral responsibility of those who promote it.

Read the Whole Article

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I don’t know why Iran agreed to the ceasefire, but it did. Iranian leaders, in my opinion, are frighteningly naive. Some apparently believe that they can achieve a legitimate negotiated deal with Donald Trump. I suggest the Ayatollah and IRGC commanders read Donald Trump’s Truth Social posting regarding Bibi Netanyahu (see image). Despite Trump’s temper tantrum on Monday — when he dropped the F-bomb complaining about the ignorance of Iran and Israel — he still has his lips firmly planted on Bibi’s backside and will likely look for a pretext to continue the war with Iran.

While there is no doubt that Israel inflicted some serious damage on Iran by killing scores of military leaders and nuclear scientists, Iran hit Israel far harder. Consider the following facts:

Israel has one international airport… Ben Gurion.

Iran has 29 international airports.

By closing Ben Gurion, Iran cut off Israel’s access to commercial air traffic. Israel hit at least three airports in Iran, but did not stop commercial air traffic to Iran.

How about seaports? Israel only has two ports that handle container ships — Haifa and Ashdod. Iran forced the closure of Haifa and was on its way to doing the same to Ashdod. Iran, by contrast, has eight principal ports on the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman:

Port of Shahid Rajaee (Bandar Abbas complex)

Bandar Abbas (general shipping)

Chabahar (direct access to Indian Ocean)

Bandar Khomeini, Bandar Mahshahr, Bushehr, Parsian, Hormuz

None were forced to suspend operations.

If Iran had shuttered Ashdod, Israel would have faced the prospect of significant shortages of essential items, including food and energy. Israel would have been compelled to rely on military airports for resupply, but it appears those airfields were hit by Iranian missiles and suffered some damage. The extent of the destruction is unknown thanks to the efficiency of Israeli censors.

Iran also hurt Israel’s ability to refine oil at the Haifa Refinery — Operated by BAZAN Group (formerly Oil Refineries Ltd.), located in Haifa Bay, with a capacity of approximately 197,000 barrels per day (~9 million tons annually). Iran reportedly hit and severely damaged the Haifa Refinery. Israel has one other refinery at Ashdod — Owned by Paz Oil Company, based in Ashdod, with a capacity of about 108,000 barrels per day (~5.4 million tons annually). I have seen no reports about Iranian attacks on the facility at Ashdod.

Had this war continued, Israel likely would have faced an unprecedented economic crisis if it lost its two main container ports and its refineries. Because Israel’s air-defense system had been rendered inoperable and Iran continued to demonstrate the ability to hit critical infrastructure, Israel could have faced a genuine existential crisis.

IAEA Director Rafael Grossi is in a panic. During an interview with a French TV station, he admitted:

The IAEA has lost the ability to monitor Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile following the recent escalation between Israel and Iran.

I think Iranian officials now realize they were played for fools by the IAEA. Circumstantial evidence points to IAEA as the source that provided the names, addresses and phone numbers of the Iranian nuclear scientists that were murdered by Israeli operatives. Iran is taking steps to end its relationship with the IAEA, according to Eureka News:

The Iranian Parliament approved a bill on Wednesday to suspend cooperation with the IAEA.

Alireza Salimi, a member of the Iranian Parliament’s presidency, stated that the decision would be referred to the Supreme National Security Council for approval. He also said that agency inspectors would be banned from entering the country and that sanctions would be imposed on those who allowed them in.

“The International Atomic Energy Agency did not even formally condemn the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, so it has lost its international credibility,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Parliament.

He also stressed that the country intends to continue working on peaceful nuclear energy, despite the threats. “Iran will be more ready and prepared than ever, our hand is on the trigger, and we will respond with overwhelming force to any aggression,” he stated.

Grossi is throwing his own version of a temper tantrum, telling Eureka News:

Iran has an obligation to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency on its nuclear program,” its Director General, Rafael Grossi, told France 2 on Wednesday.

In detail, the senior official stated that Iran’s cooperation with the agency “is not a favor, it is a legal obligation as long as Iran remains a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

In light of the events of the last 12 days, Iran would be entirely justified to withdraw from the NPT. I wonder if Russia and China are reconsidering their cooperation with IAEA. Russia’s Sergei Lavrov made the same observation as Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (see above)… harshly criticizing the IAEA’s failure to denounce the Israeli and US attacks on Iran’s nuclear plants.

While Trump is confident that Iran will return to the negotiating table, I remain skeptical that Iran is willing to sit down with Steve Witkoff and agree to halt all uranium enrichment. Given the perfidy of the IAEA and the unlawful actions of Israel and the United States, Iranian officials would be fools to entertain such talks. That’s my opinion. We will see what Iranian officials say this week.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

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Donald Trump and his allies continue to complain that the central bank isn’t inflating the money supply enough. Last week, Bill Pulte, Trump’s appointee to the Federal Housing and Finance Administration—and the head of Fannie and Freddie—complained that Powell and the FOMC weren’t forcing down interest rates enough.

Pulte wrote on X/Twitter:

Because President Trump has crushed inflation, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell needs to lower interest rates today, and if not Chairman Powell needs to resign, immediately. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can help so many more Americans if Chair Powell will just do his job and lower rates.

With these comments, Pulte is demonstrating that he, like his boss Donald Trump, subscribes to the standard Yellen-Bernanke inflationist model of monetary policy: the job of the central bank is to forever force down interest rates, churn out more easy money, and devalue the currency.

Pulte claims publicly that this somehow makes homes more affordable. As we’ll see below, though, the Fed’s easy-money policy of recent decades has not made home more affordable. Rather, Fed policy has helped to relentless increase home prices through the Fed’s asset purchases, interest rate policy, and monetary inflation.

Although Pulte is engaging in performative protests against “too-high” interest rates, it is more likely he is being motivated by the usual crony “capitalist” agenda: press for more monetary inflation so Wall Street will enjoy the fruits of more asset-price inflation.

Of course, that’s just speculation. But, his actual motivations are immaterial to the fact that following the recommendation of Trump, Vance, Pulte, et al, will only continue to blow up a housing bubble and place housing ever more beyond the reach of ordinary people.

Do Falling Interest Rates Increase Home Prices?

There is a fairly clear inverse relationship between interest rates and home prices. This is certainly obvious to real estate agents and their lobbyists who perennially lobby for lower interest rates because they know that lower interest rates lead to more home purchases and higher prices. This in turn, leads to higher commissions for agents.

The inverse relationship is reflected in this graph:

Source: Source: US Census Bureau and Freddie Mac.

There are many factors that affect mortgage rates, of course, but over the past thirty years—and especially since 2009—falling interest rates have coincided with rising home prices. In fact, falling interest rates slightly precede rising home prices, suggesting a causal relationship.

It’s easy to picture how falling interest rates lead to higher prices. When mortgage rates are low, it is easier to afford monthly payments on, say, a $300,000 mortgage. At three percent, the monthly payment is about $1700 per month. At six percent, though, the payment on the same mortgage is nearly $2300 per month. Clearly, there are more potential buyers for the house at the lower interest rate.

But there are important monetary reasons that explain why low interest rates drive prices higher. In the modern context of inflationary fiat currency, lower interest rates are usually fueled by new money creation, and this monetary inflation drives more asset price inflation.

This is because central banks “set” their lower interest rates through open market operations that involve increases in the money supply. In Understanding Money Mechanics, economist Bob Murphy explains:

Specifically, when monetary base growth is high, the federal funds rate is low. And vice versa, when the growth in the monetary base slows, the fed funds rate shoots up.

There is nothing mysterious about this. To repeat, this is the standard explanation given in economics textbooks—not just Austrian texts—to explain how a central bank “sets” interest rates. When the central bank wants to cut rates, it buys more assets and floods the market with more base money. And when the central bank wants to raise rates, it slows the pace of monetary inflation (or even reverses course entirely and shrinks the monetary base).

In other words, falling interest rates are a manifestation of monetary inflation, and monetary inflation often shows up as asset price inflation. We see this reflected in home prices when the central bank works to drive down interest rates. This, of course, is also reflected in consumer price inflation, which rose to forty-year highs in 2022. It is not a coincidence that after a decade of extreme efforts to inflate home prices after 2009, consumer prices surged nearly 25 percent in only five years, from 2020 to 2025.

The Fed’s Stockpile of Mortgage Securities

The Federal Reserve has been deliberately and specifically meddling with home prices ever since Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan explicitly sought to blow up a housing bubble as a means of exiting the 2001 recession in the United States. This policy, however, reached never-before-seen levels of intervention in 2009 when the central bank directly intervened in the economy to buy up trillions of dollars worth of mortgage backed securities (MBSs). The Fed did this to force down mortgage rates and to inflate prices of MBSs as a means of bailing out major commercial banks which faced catastrophic declines in their mortgage-heavy portfolios.

No discussion about home prices or mortgage rates captures the full context of the housing market unless we consider the effects of the Fed’s stockpile of mortgage-backed securities. So long as the fed sits on its hoard of mortgage assets, home prices are being inflated by artificial Fed-created demand for mortgages.

(Alex Pollock has examined how the Fed turned itself into the world’s largest Savings and Loan through this process.)

We can see the history of this phenomenon in the graph below. When the 2007 housing crash began, the Fed sprang into action to bail out Wall Street by buying up MBS assets. This turned around the downward trend in housing prices which would have made housing more affordable, but would also have made banks lose a lot of money. So, the Fed (and the Bush administration) decided to inflate real estate asset prices, and prices headed up again. The Fed bought up more of these assets in 2013 and 2014 to further “stimulate” asset prices and force down mortgage rates. When the Fed finally began to allow some of these assets to roll off the balance sheet in 2019, home prices finally moderated. But, the Fed started a new buying Frenzy in response to the covid panic, and home prices surged with historic speed.

Source: US Census Bureau and Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

It is true that, in recent years, the Fed has very slowly allowed some of these assets to begin rolling off the balance sheet. Not surprisingly, we have also seen home prices finally start to level off. But, the rate at which the allows this to happen is purposely extremely slow so as to ensure that home prices do not actually fall by any significant amount. Again, what comes first is concern for Wall Street. Falling home prices, of course, would be denounced as “deflation,” which the central bank eternally opposes. After all, the whole point of the Fed’s mortgage asset purchases is to make homes more expensive. That’s good for the banks which continue to benefit from the ongoing bailout that is the Fed’s asset purchase scheme.

Why Care if Home Prices Rise?

But why should we care if home prices rise? After all, as Pulte suggests, can’t “we” just make homes affordable again by lowering interest rates?

Well, it’s not that easy.

After all, if it were that easy, then we wouldn’t now be looking at housing affordability hit a multi-decade low while the average age of homeowners surges. This didn’t suddenly happen in recent weeks because—as Trump seems to think—Powell is just being intransigent.

According to the Atlanta Fed’s affordability index, affordability has fallen 45 percent since 2012, and began a precipitous decline during the first quarter of 2021—before price inflation forced the the Fed to allow interest rates to increase from historic lows. Moreover, the homeownership rate has fallen by six percent since 2004. This happened in spite of the Fed’s inflation-fueled efforts to drive down mortgage rates again and again. In fact, thanks in part to these efforts, the money supply has increased by 231 percent since the Fed began buying up mortgages in 2009.

Monetary inflation is limited by the political realities of price inflation. Eventually, people start to notice that their wealth and incomes are being inflated away. Central banks cannot just simply inflate nonstop to force down interest rates to please real estate agents and Donald Trump—at least not without imposing the devastating economic effects of price inflation.

Moreover, just driving down mortgage rates comes with other costs. As home prices increase, this can’t fixed by simply financing everything to the hilt at low interest rates. With rising home prices comes higher down payments, higher property taxes, and higher insurance costs. This can’t all just be rolled into mortgages. For many ordinary people, monthly payments raise as home prices rise, even in a low-interest-rate environment.

Unfortunately, central bankers can’t wave a magic wand and make price inflation disappear while the same central bankers also push easy money to force down interest rates. This is why we continue to see declining homeownership rates and rising debt loads as owning a home becomes ever more out of reach.

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

The post How the Fed Made Housing Unaffordable appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Democratic Party put another bullet in its head this week with the election of the charming, affable jihadi communist Zohran Mamdani. Is “communist” too harsh a label? (He styles himself, softly, a “socialist.”) Yet his campaign platform looks like a template from the venerable Soviet Council of Ministers circa 1957: Free Everything: housing, buses and subways, college, child-care, government food stores. . . with a cherry-on-top of replacing police with social workers in high crime areas — because rapists and car-jackers would quit their rowdy ways if only they could talk about their feelings.

If you believe the news reports emanating from Woke Central, Zohran received major support from the folks who predominate the Upper West Side, where he was raised-up by his Columbia prof Dad and film-maker Mom. That is, voted in by the same high-income demographic that flocks to Zabar’s Deli on Sunday mornings for smoked sturgeon and babka — a curious alliance. I guess this solves the old riddle of why Europe’s Jews walked so placidly into Auschwitz.

“Life imitates art,” old Oscar Wilde liked to say, and with so many self-administered bullets in its head now, the Democratic Party looks more and more like The Walking Dead, a necromantic tribute to its erstwhile mascot, “Joe Biden,” the Phantom of the White House. Fortunately, the Latinx bombshell, AOC, America’s answer to Eva Peron, has stepped up to the leadership role, flanked by the foxy Jasmine Crockett, with their mentor, Bernie Sanders close at hand (on a leash, really) barking validation for the Party’s death trip.

It’s a wonder of our time (and its playful zeitgeist) that New Yorkers might choose a mayor even worse than the brain-dead colossus, Bill de Blasio, but there it is, in plain sight for all to behold. The Big Apple and its various services will now go from their currently merely broke-ass condition, to the complete collapse of infrastructure, transit, housing, revenue, business, and public safety, in other words, to true Third World authenticity! Serious people, who run viable businesses, support families, and pay whopping taxes, are in a panic, all a’chatter about moving elsewhere.

That chatter is not idle, especially among the class that owns major real estate, of which New York City has a frightening and increasingly obsolete inventory — hundreds of office skyscrapers running at fifty percent (or less) occupancy, which cannot cover their mortgages, maintenance, or taxes. What will become of them? I’ll tell you: some will be foreclosed-on, sold for dimes on the dollar (and fail again under new ownership,) and quite few will stand empty waiting for acanthus tree seeds to sprout on their empty windowsills.

Or, they will turn into “squats,” like the towers in the abandoned city center of Johannesburg that I saw visiting there ten years ago. Those giant office buildings were not converted into “residential,” you understand; folks were simply camping-out there, even with the electricity and water turned off. This is exactly what happens when you run the prosperous people, whom you hate, out of town, which is what happened in that sad-sack nation. How many demonstration projects like that are needed to prove that communism with a racist frosting on top is a mug’s game.

Of course, we’re not there yet. Zohran hasn’t been sworn in, though the victory celebration just now looks like it’s fait accompli. You can only imagine the frantic conversation running between the old party poohbahs out in the cold: Chuck Schumer, Hakim, Nadler, Obama, even the loser, Cuomo, plus the non-elected party apparatchiks: Axelrod, Podesta, Carville, Plouffe, Emmanuel. . . . They’re not saying, but I bet many are silently wondering: Is there some way we can just disappear the guy? Make him go away? X him out? Cancel his ass? (Someone, for Godsake, find a couple of girls who will say he groped them in an elevator!)

Or maybe some electoral work-around? Maybe put what remains of the party’s dwindling financial mojo back behind Eric Adams — yes, he’s still Mayor — who supposedly quit the party (after they tried and failed to stuff him in prison) and is running for mayor now as an independent. . . but who will surely welcome whatever support and moolah they can bring to his cause. Adams’s two great virtues as a political figure: he’s not Bill de Blasio and he’s not Zohran Mamdani.

New York might go down the drain anyway. At least for a while. That broken business model for skyscrapers is not going away anytime soon, and neither is the greatly augmented Third World population funneled across the open border into New York City by “Joe Biden’s” shadowy minders. Will New York turn into that fairytale town whose economy subsisted on people simply taking in each other’s laundry?

Well, the city will always have its geographical assets, like, the best goshdarn ocean harbor in the whole east coast. Something will be there. . . some human agglomeration. But what? And over all of that, like the uncanny eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, looming above the ash-heaps of Queens County on the road to West Egg, lately rises the stern visage of Donald J. Trump, New York real estate mogul superbus, and now President of this sore-beset nation, watching events roll out.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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Israel’s devastating June 13 attack on Iran surprised the world. Not because it happened, but because of when it happened. President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb Iran a week later caught the world off guard as well — also because of when it happened rather than that it happened.

Trump floated the idea of striking Iranian nuclear sites multiple times over a span of a few days. But he said he would decide within two weeks. Two days later, American B-2 stealth bombers flew into Iranian airspace, dropped 14 bunker-busting bombs — each weighting 30,000 pounds — on three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran, and zipped back home.

Ceasefire

But perhaps most shocking was Trump’s announcement on Monday. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, he declared the war over. He even christened it with a catchy name, the “12 Day War,” not as short as another war the Israelis were involved in (the Six-Day War), but short nonetheless.

Not everyone welcomed the news. Fox’s Mark Levin, for example, did not. He suspects Iran’s nuclear program survived, a sentiment that grew wings Tuesday after legacy media outlets spread far and wide news of an intelligence leak making the same claim.

Levin’s media archenemy, Tucker Carlson, had the opposite reaction. His team stamped Tuesday’s daily morning newsletter with the subject line, “Thank God Donald Trump brokered a ceasefire. That’s the last thing Mark Levin wanted.” After the leak, he sent out another email in the afternoon, claiming the Deep State will stop at nothing to provoke a war.

The world learned of the ceasefire after the president announced it on his Truth Social account Monday evening. “It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE,” he decreed.  The announcement was so out of the blue that, according to some reports, it “caught even some of Mr. Trump’s own top administration officials by surprise.”

Frustrated Plans

Over the next few hours, it looked as though the two warring countries were reluctant to oblige the American president. Israel and Iran were still lobbing missiles and bombs at each other. The Guardian reported:

Donald Trump has declared a ceasefire intended to bring an end to a 12-day war between Israel and Iran, but despite public acceptance of the truce, both sides continued to exchange fire on Tuesday morning. Air raid sirens sounded in northern Israel at about 10.30am, in response to what the Israeli military said was an Iranian missile launch, about two and a half hours after the ceasefire was first announced. Israeli reports said two missiles had been intercepted. Iran denied launching missiles after the ceasefire but Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said he had ordered immediate retaliation on Tehran.

This made Trump angry. He expressed his dissatisfaction with a rare public use of the “f-word” when talking to reporters. “They don’t know what the f- they’re doing,” he bawled. Trump aired further frustration to the media, specifically aimed at Israel. He said, “Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before, the biggest load that we’ve seen.” The Guardian was somehow able to measure Trump’s scolding as “the strongest-worded public rebuke of Israel of any US president in history.”

Trump then told the Israelis, as a stern father would a child, to knock it off. He posted on his Truth Social account in all caps: “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” And, apparently, Israel listened.

The Jerusalem Post corroborated that Trump indeed read Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act. Israeli fighter jets were just minutes away from hitting 20 Iranian targets when Trump got on a call with Netanyahu and told him to put a lid on it. According to the report:

A source familiar with the details told The Jerusalem Post that Trump raised his voice at the prime minister, demanding, “Stop the attack.” The source noted that Netanyahu managed to say little during the call, though he repeatedly expressed gratitude to the US President. The source said, “It was a tough conversation between Netanyahu and President Trump. Trump viewed this as a personal achievement, and made it clear that no one — absolutely no one — would undermine it.”

The pilots pulled back on the attack and hit a radar station near Tehran as a compromise.

Problem Solved

Shortly afterward, Trump issued another update. This one informed the world that everyone will now behave. “ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,” Trump wrote.

By late Tuesday morning in the United States, it was beginning to look as if Trump’s peace “imposition” was starting to become reality. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Iran’s foreign minister later said his country would halt firing if Israel stopped its attacks. Israel confirmed the cease-fire on Tuesday morning, saying its war aims had been achieved.

In another round of Middle Eastern kabuki theater designed to preserve national pride, Iran’s foreign minister announced on state TV that Iran had fought until the very last minute.

The Times claimed to have spoken to three diplomats familiar with how the ceasefire came about. And based on that report, the world owes the Qataris a pat on the back for helping the Americans mediate peace:

Qatar intervened on behalf of the Trump administration and persuaded Iran to agree to a cease-fire with Israel.… The three diplomats said that Mr. Trump had told Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, that Israel had signed off on an American cease-fire proposal. They added that the president had asked that Qatar help bring Iran on board. The Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, then persuaded Iran to agree to the proposal in a call with the Iranian leadership, the diplomats said.

What was accomplished?

Read the Whole Article

The post Did America Truly ‘Obliterate’ Iran’s Nuclear Program? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Several commentators have recently pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resembles the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” in the Aesop’s fable.

In 1992, the then-parliamentarian gave an address to the Knesset in which he asserted that Iran was “three to five years” away from reaching nuclear weapons capability, and that this danger needed to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.”

In his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism, he made a similar claim, as he did in addresses to Congress in 1996 and in 2002. During the latter address, he claimed that Saddam Hussein was also close to getting a nuke.

A 2009 U.S. State Department cable released by Wikileaks reported that the then-prime ministerial candidate Netanyahu had assured a visiting Congressional delegation that Iran was “probably one or two years away” from developing nuclear weapons capability. Another 2009 cable reported the re-elected Prime Minister telling another delegation of American politicos that “Iran has the capability now to make one bomb … [or] they could wait and make several bombs in a year or two.”

In a 2010 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, he asserted “You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs . . . that’s what is happening in Iran.”

In 2012 Netanyahu said in talks reported by Israeli media that Iran is just “a few months away” from attaining nuclear capabilities.” Later in 2012 he addressed the United Nations and asserted that Iran would be able to build a nuke in roughly one year.

To be fair, one could argue that the key point was that Iran was working diligently on acquiring the nuke and would eventually succeed, even if it took far longer than Netanyahu’s intelligence sources claimed.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s repeated assurances over the last thirty years are indeed strongly reminiscent of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

At last, the Israeli prime minister seems to have persuaded President Trump to take military action against this threat that has apparently been imminent since 1992.

Will Netanyahu be satisfied with the results of Operation Midnight Hammer? How will President Trump react if Netanyahu claims that Iran is still in possession of weapons grade nuclear material or that the enrichment facilities were not—has Trump has vehemently asserted—totally destroyed?

One interpretation of this latest Middle East Smoke and Mirror Show is that Trump launched Operation Midnight Hammer not only to take out Iranian nuclear facilities, but also in a gambit to satisfy Netanyahu and his cronies in Washington.

Because it was a highly sophisticated, expensive, and politically risky operation, it could provide Trump with considerable political leverage to tell Bibi to put a sock in it—at least for the next four years.

I often wonder what James Madison would think of the United States government now being the arbiter of the great tribal conflicts of the Middle East. He was particularly well versed in ancient Rome’s entanglements in the region—entanglements that were costly for the Roman treasury and army, but also served as a handy distraction in the event that the plebeians on the Italian peninsula became unhappy with their patrician rulers. As he put in a debate at the Constitutional Convention:

Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended.

I suspect Madison’s observation also applies to the rulers of Iran and Israel. It seems that a lot of ordinary Iranians are not happy with their rulers and that a lot of ordinary Israelis are not happy with theirs.

POSTSCRIPT: Judging by reader responses, many feeling that the Boy Who Cried Wolf fable does not apply to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s long history of claiming that Iran’s possession of nuclear bomb was imminent. As I acknowledged in my original post, it could be that the key point was that Iran was pursuing the bomb, not the development timeline.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that this isn’t a very satisfying claim. Whenever anyone proclaims that he is threatened by a danger so that he can justify committing a violent acts—or to persuade others to commit violent acts—the individual making the assertion has a responsibility to ascertain that the danger is real and not merely a danger that he feels confident will emerge at some point in the future. Otherwise, the individual making the claim will risk losing credibility and be perceived as the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Will Netanyahu Be Satisfied With Trump’s Assurance? appeared first on LewRockwell.

One rule has remained true for generations when it comes to the division between the sexes: Men are held accountable for everything, women accept accountability for nothing.

Obviously, there’s going to be exceptions to the rule, but the majority of the time it is true that modern western women have a serious problem taking responsibility when things go wrong. They have been taught from a very early age that they are victims: Victims of men, victims of society, victims of “patriarchy”, victims of religion, victims of biology, victims of circumstance, etc.

The feminist movement is built entirely around the notion that women can weaponize their victimhood as a means to control society.

I continue to hold that feminism is the KEY movement that has undermined the success of western culture. Their zealotry has led to the destruction of the nuclear family (the most important factor in a healthy nation). They have helped to facilitate the near collapse of the west and this problem needs to be addressed before it’s too late.

I recently came across an article in the New York Times which explains the decline in western relationships in a way that is both hilarious and depressing. The essay is titled ‘Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back’. The author (a 50-something woman from Chicago) recalls the old days of dating when men were easy targets for exploitation.

“We knew what worked. We knew how to frame a face, a gesture, a moment of implication — just enough to ignite fantasy and open a wallet. I came to understand, in exact terms, what cues tempt the average 18-to-36-year-old cis heterosexual man. What drew him in. What kept him coming back. It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation — clean, fast and frictionless…”

“…That dynamic has quietly collapsed. We have moved into an era where many men no longer seek women to impress other men or to connect across difference. They perform elsewhere. Alone. They’ve filtered us out.”

The author insinuates that the era of easy money and easy sex for women was a product of the masculine dynamics of competition and status (blame men). Yet, she also seems to be waxing nostalgic, longing for those days to return. This was the “Sex And The City” era in the late 1990s and early 2000s that was born from the sexual revolution of second wave feminism. It was the era in which female promiscuity and greed was glorified as the ultimate expression of women’s empowerment.

The idea was to turn women’s early adult years into a Dionysian orgy; giving away sex to any man with decent looks and a fat wallet in the hopes of eventually trapping a lifetime pay-pig. Marriage and maybe family would come in their 30s (or maybe 40s), but not until they had achieved as much degenerate fun as they could muster.

The problem is, women are on a biological clock, which is why for thousands of years marriage was THE primary concern for the fairer sex. To waste their 20s giving away their bodies for nothing? That was unthinkable insanity. This would doom them to decades of misery as lonely old maids living off the charity of others, and frankly nothing has changed. Childless cat ladies are still a thing and they are still embarrassing.

Only in the first world are these women able to survive.

No one looks at a spinster and sees her as “powerful” or free. Everyone can smell her failure. Her desperation. Her cope. This is why, more and more, we are beginning to see a sense of panic among women who bought into the feminist con game. They’re realizing that men are not chasing them anymore.

It started out as a joke among woke leftists who laughed at the “rise of incels”. The number of single men refusing to enter the dating world was skyrocketing and the feminists said this was a good thing. Let the “ugly scrubs” wallow in their loneliness while the ladies go out and gorge on freedom and fun until they get sick. However, the trend has continued to the point that a majority of men are checking out completely.

Recent surveys reveal that 63% of young men ages 18-29 are single. Around 30% of men have not been sexually active for a year or more. In 1980, 60% of adults were married by the age of 25. Today, only 20% are married by age 25. Men are exiting relationships and marriage at record pace, and because men are the initiators of relationships (men are biologically designed to take risks and pursue), women are starting to feel the pinch.

The latest data predicts that 45% of women ages of 25 to 44 will be single and childless by the year 2030, and not necessarily by choice. If a woman is single and childless by the time she reaches her mid-30s, her chances of creating a family drop exponentially along with her fertility.

They are calling it the female loneliness epidemic and it’s bearing down on western society like a freight train. Even feminists are getting worried. As the New York Times opines:

“There was a time, not so long ago, when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast. When the act of staying the night didn’t announce a relationship, just a willingness to be human for a few more hours. Now, even that kind of unscripted contact feels rare. We’ve built so many boundaries that we’ve walled off the very moments that make connection memorable…”

“This idea that vulnerability is a threat instead of an invitation has created a culture of hesitation, of men circling intimacy but never entering it. And the result is thousands of tiny silos. Everyone performing closeness, but no one making a move that binds. Isolation. Loneliness. A hunger for contact that has nowhere to land…”

But of course, the Times doesn’t seem to think women are culpable in the slightest for this outcome. Instead, they continue the blame game:

“So here’s what I’ll say: You are missed. Not just by me, but by the world you once helped shape…”

“We remember you. The version of you that lingered at the table. That laughed from the chest. That asked questions and waited for the answers. That touched without taking. That listened – really listened – when a woman spoke.

You are not gone, but your presence is thinning. In restaurants, in friendships, in the slow rituals of romantic emergence. You’ve retreated – not into malice, but into something softer and harder all at once: Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.

Maybe no one taught you how to stay. Maybe you tried once, and it hurt. Maybe the world told you your role was to provide, to perform, to protect — and never to feel…”

Listen men, your lack of participation is starting to stress out the ladies. Just admit you can’t handle intimacy. Just admit you can’t handle these “powerful” women and their vast intellects and emotional genius. You need to be taught how to behave, that’s all. Just crawl back to them and they’re ready to tolerate you again. Isn’t that nice? They’re giving you a second chance…

At no point does the author ask WHY men are exhausted? At no point does she ask any actual men what they think or feel before writing her nonsensical screed. Obscured by insufferable and flowery prose, she still blames men while asking them to come back. And that should tell you everything you need to know about feminism in general.

I would ask feminists the million dollar question that they have avoided for so long:  Have you considered the possibility that men ghost you and will not commit to you because YOU are the problem?  The answer is no, obviously.

I’m a man in my mid-40s who thankfully dodged the bulk of wokeness in the dating world, but I think I can still explain for the NYT why men are walking away if they’re willing to listen.

1) First, I must say that an author in her 50s still longing for casual sitcom encounters like she’s in her 20s reveals a lot about why modern women are oblivious. Real life is not Sex In The City – Most men of means do not gravitate towards long term relationships with women in their grandma phase. She should already be in a happy relationship or marriage, she’s had plenty of time to figure this out.

Feminism has made women think they can engage with life on their own schedule. They can’t.

2) Men are especially wary of women with baggage. Women initiate 70% of breakups and divorces and feminist influence over family law has made divorce easier and more lucrative than ever for women. The older a woman is the more baggage she has and the less likely a man is going to want to date her seriously, let alone put an expensive ring on her finger.

Western women have been taught they need to party in their 20s, then pursue serious relationships in their 30s or 40s. Meaning, they ignore their best prospects for at least a decade. Their ideology sets them up to enter the relationship market when their marriage value is lowest.

3) Men are no longer tolerating the concept of the sexual revolution. They don’t want to take any chances on women who think promiscuity is a virtue. They know that statistically, women who sleep around lack discernment, the ability to connect, self respect and mental stability. Starting a relationship with such a person will only lead to disaster. They never stay happy for long (the grass is always greener). And so, men stay home. Want to get them back? Keep your body count low.

4) Third-Wave Feminists spent the better part of the last 20 years telling men they are pure evil for being masculine and wanting to chase women. So, men did what you asked of them – They stopped chasing you. They found other more interesting endeavors like their careers and their hobbies. If you want men to come back, perhaps you should APOLOGIZE for all those years of slander.

5) Modern women have greatly overestimated the usefulness of sex as a bartering tool for securing a man. If you want a man to stick around you’re going to have to show him love and respect, not just what’s inside your pants.

6) Men are far more conditioned to be alone than women are. Women are communal creatures. They rely on constant interactions, affirmations and group inclusion. Social media might fill the void for a while but it can’t give them what they really want – Intimate personal attention 24/7. Only a partner and children can give you that. In a battle of who can endure loneliness longer, men will win, so don’t make it into a battle.

7) I’ll tell you the biggest open secret that modern women still don’t understand – They claim that men are afraid of approaching them. They say that men today are “weak” and that they can’t handle the new era of the “boss babe”. They argue that men need to abandon their traditional masculine roles and act more feminine; this will make it easier for everyone to get along.

These are common jabs at the male ego designed to make men feel ashamed for distancing themselves from feminists. In reality, men value one thing above all else: Peace. If you can’t offer peace, then no man with any sense of self worth has a use for you. Feminists offer the opposite of peace, and so they have no value.

8) Feminism, like all Marxist movements, is obsessed with power. Everything they do is driven by a desire for power and control; not just over their own lives but over the world around them. Modern women say they want the same power as men, but they need to accept that no matter how much the scales are tipped in their favor through laws, government subsidies, easy college grants, DEI hiring and unfair divorce, they will never be like men.

The author suggests that men no longer shape the world because they have abandoned the current relationship dynamic. This is foolish. Men continue to shape everything around you. Every utility, every necessity, every government, nearly every company, your safety and security, your ability to be free, it’s all reliant on men. You have no power and you never will.

Feminist empowerment is a fantasy based on institutional leverage which men ALLOW them to have. Until they stop coveting power they can’t comprehend or handle the divisions between men and women will not be resolved. In short, if feminists want men to pay attention to them again, they will have to stop being feminists.

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Feminists Are Begging for Men To Come Back But Still Blame Them for Everything appeared first on LewRockwell.

From July 1921 to July 1929 (8 years), politicians pushed us into Great Depression I by inflating money by 62%, From August 2008 through April 2022 (14 years), politicians pushed us into the current Great Depression II by inflating money by 303%.

Eventually we will get some politicians to do the right things, after they exhaust the alternatives.

Background: constitutional, error-cycle free, world asset %, value-adding,

100%‑reserve gold constitutionality and history of use, stock-based money

Fractional-Reserve Moneys Consume Value

Under fractional-reserve gold standards after the Constitution was ratified, politicians granted bankers an unconstitutional privilege to create and loan out money that wasn’t backed 100% by saved assets held in reserve.

Bankers would steadily create money, producing a boom. Producers would as a result make more unsustainable investments than usual, bringing a bust.

More people than usual wouldn’t pay back loans, or people would run to withdraw their savings from banks, and banks would fail. This would rapidly destroy some of the created money.

With less money available for the same products, people would lower the prices of products and labor. Money would buy more. But borrowers would earn less, and loan contracts didn’t adjust for this crisis deflation.

Politicians had let bankers inflate the money quantity, and this had changed the meaning of people’s loan contracts. Politicians then helped bankers by enforcing those loan contracts on borrowers. By allowing money inflation and then enforcing the changed loan contracts, politicians unduly deprived borrowers of property.

Fractional-reserve dollars let crony-socialist politicians spend more, give cronies more favors, and rake in more donations. Politicians’ booms bought votes, and politicians’ busts enlarged governments.

While fractional reserves brought deprivations, gold standards did bring helpful natural deflation.

Gold mining slowly inflated the quantity of gold. But unlike banker-created money, mined gold never got destroyed. Also, the population and its productivity increased faster. The net result was that gold’s purchasing power gradually increased.

People could save gold-backed money and later purchase more products. For many decades, this money increased in value 2.1% to 2.4% per year.

100%-Reserve Moneys Conserve Value

Going forward, congressmen and presidents could immediately require the Fed’s people to make the money quantity constant. The money quantity wouldn’t be increased by mining, but there would still be fractional reserves, so the money quantity would still change. And there would still be delays in collecting information and in making corrections, so the Fed’s people would still control the money’s quantity slowly, poorly, and unpredictably.

Instead, congressmen and presidents could immediately set the value of the dollar equivalent to a fixed weight of gold, determined by the price of gold at the time they make this change.

Or, state politicians could create gold moneys by offering gold warehousing and gold transaction processing. Transactional gold has been enacted in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, and is being advanced in 21 more states. Private companies should also be free to compete separately to provide warehousing and transaction processing more efficiently.

Or politicians could immediately repeal legal tender laws, tax laws, and all other laws that interfere with using 100%-reserve moneys. Producers would then develop competing moneys.

100%-reserve gold will at last give people a constitutional money. People will no longer be forced to use a money that deprives them of property. Gold will even be suitable to constitutionally be coined and have a regulated weight.

100%-reserve gold worked well—free from fractional-reserve moneys’ crisis-deflation liquidity crises—in the Dutch Republic from 1609 through the late 1770s. This good money helped the Dutch spread their political and economic practices to help free the English and then free the Americans.

100%-reserve moneys eliminate boom-bust government money error cycles: GME (“gimme”) cycles. These moneys also increase in purchasing power. As Great Depression II continues and money inflation continues, moneys that eliminate error cycles and that increase in purchasing power will keep becoming more attractive.

Bitcoin as money would lack gold’s history of use as an economywide money, gold’s history of legal support, and the many instructive, case-specific lessons learned using gold. Using proven solutions like 100%-reserve gold greatly reduces risks.

Bitcoin would also start out behind gold in asset value.

Mainly, though, bitcoin as money would simply not bring advantages.

Stock-Based Money Will Add Value

Stock-based money not only will eliminate error cycles but also will increase in purchasing power the fastest.

Stocks are ownership of businesses. Since businesses produce the value that’s used to purchase all other assets, stocks determine all assets’ potential value.

Stocks will be bought with stock-based money. Stocks will no longer be bought with bank-created money that’s created out of thin air and loaned out. Stocks will need to likewise no longer be allowed to be bought “on margin” using broker-created money, sometimes even using the same collateral for multiple investments.

Since buying stocks will then require investing savings, borrowers won’t be able to take other investors on wild rides up and down. Investors won’t be able to inflate stock prices as much. And when there are government pandemic responses, government wars, localized disasters, or isolated bankruptcies, investors will just lower stock prices to reflect the lower anticipated near-term profits.

If any nation’s government people would limit their people’s use of stock-based money, their people would attract much less investment than people elsewhere would attract. These government people would end up having limited their own power.

When money is made up of stocks, the proportion of world assets that people will keep invested in productive properties will be roughly doubled. This will usher in a new most-“golden” age.

Politicians have been using our money for themselves. We’ll do far better when we use our money for ourselves.

The post Good Moneys: 100%-Reserve Gold, Stock-Based Money appeared first on LewRockwell.

Did you see Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson’s heated interview that came out a week ago? If you didn’t, it was something else. In fairness to Cruz, I do believe Carlson was poking and prodding in ways that were a bit annoying, and I don’t fault Cruz for being irritated with Carlson at times. In addition, until Cruz embarrassed himself with two-bit Dispensationalist heresy, I don’t think he was being overly unreasonable, and I agreed with his sentiments in some cases.

Carlson and Cruz spoke largely about the Iran-Israel situation, which, as it stands, is in a state of flux. I won’t pretend to be an expert on it, and what may be the outcome could change at any moment. Due to the subject matter, they discussed the notion of whether a nation, in this case the United States, should be purely isolationist regarding global conflicts or whether there is room for joining in the conflicts involving other nations. Frankly, I personally agree with Cruz that pure isolationism may not be ideal and that there can be instances wherein allies do have each other’s backs. This is to say nothing about Israel per se, only that I agree with the concept.

In any event, Carlson’s poking and prodding was not senseless or just for dramatic effect, and eventually the interview reached a crescendo when Cruz exposed himself for his Dispensationalist views, which he said explicitly animate his insistence that the State of Israel must be protected at all costs. Without even being asked the question directly, Cruz insisted on telling Carlson why he vowed to be a staunch defender of Israel. He said, “Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed; I want to be on the blessing side of things.”

Now, if you are Catholic and even understand a small portion of the Faith, you will know that those sacrifices ceased and they prefigured the salvific sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, which is renewed—or re-presented—on the altars in our churches. The Old Testament Israelites were chosen by God to be the people from whence Christ would come, and Christ opened the gates of Heaven with His sacrifice so that all men can be saved. This is basic stuff and shouldn’t be controversial. Now, in fairness to the Dispies, it is true that when you peruse through the majority of the Church Fathers, and numerous great theologians who came after, you will find an insistence that Jews will be integral in the Second Coming of Christ—but not for the happy and fun reasons that so many Dispies think.

According to the majority view of Fathers and others, the Antichrist will be ethnically Jewish in some way, and he will convince the world he is the Messiah. And, he will somehow enthrone himself in the Temple—which will have to be rebuilt before he does that—and recommence the Old Testament sacrifices. This will all take place along with the Great Apostasy, during which most Christians will likely have renounced their faith and been caught up in the international zeitgeist that views the Antichrist as the real Christ. This will not be a fun time, but most Dispies believe there will be a “Premillennial” period where it is believed that Christ will return before a literal 1,000-year reign on earth where He will establish a physical kingdom on earth. Along with this, there is the Rapture, which is held by many Dispensationalists who believe the righteous will be taken away from the Earth before things get really bad.

Now, some adherents believe that the Rapture will happen before the Tribulation, and some believe it will be in the middle of it, and some believe it will be after. In addition, they believe there will be a restored Israel like the Israel in the Bible, and this is where Cruz’s insistence on supporting Israel comes into play.

Ultimately, those who hold these views believe it is a matter of salvation, or at least biblical history, that the nation of Israel itself should be restored to its Old Testament glory and that this is a good thing that God has foretold in the Bible. Unfortunately, this belief is held by so many influential politicians, like Cruz, and it animates their foreign policy when it comes to Israel. They literally believe that by supporting the modern State of Israel they are doing God’s will and will be rewarded through it—either by being raptured before things get bad or in some other temporal way.

Dispensationalism is insane, and it is heretical, and no one should take it seriously because it is a modern, novel belief that does not correspond to historical biblical exegesis in Catholicism or historical, mainline Protestantism. Nevertheless, those who, for some other reason, adore the modern State of Israel are more than happy to promote and tolerate this heresy because it is good for business.

What is so tragically ironic about the whole thing is that, in a sense, Dispensationalists may be a part of the events that bring about the Second Coming, but they are tools of the devil who will help pave the way for the Antichrist.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post Ted Cruz and the Lunacy of Dispensationalism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Pathological groupthink towards a war economy.

This is a re-posting of my critical analysis from January 2025 below. It has become even more relevant with NATO’s Hague Summit, June 24-25, during which this absurd measure was increased to 5% of GNP to be reached within the next 5-10 years. For a country like Denmark, this will amount to an estimated 10% of the state’s budget!

This comes on top of what IISS let you know here:

“European defence spending jumped by 11.7% in real terms to reach USD457 billion, with 2024 marking the tenth consecutive year of growth.”

The same source estimates Russia’s 2024 military expenditures to be US$ 146 billion (or 462 if calculating it by purchasing power parity (PPP)).

Currently, none of these NATO/EU leaders have a clue about how to finance it except by taking loans (to be paid back by future generations) and reducing expenditures for a broad range of civilian purposes, such as health, education, and culture.

It will mean a further reduced capability to compete globally in terms of research, innovation, and global problem solving – such as the climate and poverty. It will, in short, give the 88% living outside the West a great boost, and sink the West even faster.

NATO’s leaders will, thereby, bring us everything but security, peace and cooperation. Their “decisions” will, whether knowingly (cynics) or not (ignorants), only bring misery and increase the risk of war in Europe, if not beyond.

This means more than a doubling of already very high military expenditures. The percentage policy relieves NATO members and their governments from doing any serious, intellectually decent threat analysis (see below how it should be done). It is enough in these dark times to just refer to Russia as a threat.

They also know that there is not one journalist around who would ask questions about that all-simplifying, politico-pathological Russia-hating reference. The selected mainstream media are all militarism-promoters.; you never hear a NATO-critical question at the S-G’s press conferences.

The Simple Facts No One Talks about

Regarding NATO and Russia’s military capabilities, please see this. NATO is leading big on every indicator. Concerning military expenditures, Russia’s are US$146 (or US$ 462 if you want the largest possible figure, see above), while NATO’s total expenditures are US$ 1,470 billion. (NATO comprises 32 countries, which account for about 60% of the world’s 190 countries.)

This makes a Russia:NATO ratio of 1:10 as of today!

But that is not enough. The arms-addicted NATO/EU leaders want an increase from 2 to 5% of GNP – or, let’s say, a doubling over the next decade. While neither NATO nor I know how Russia’s military expenditures will develop over that decade – they do serious qualitative threat analysis and not GNP percentages – NATO’s decision about the 5% aims at making NATO’s military expenditures 20 times higher than Russia’s.

If NATO/EU needs 10-20 times more money than Russia to be able to fight Russia, we are witnessing the world’s lousiest economy in action: 10-20 times the Bucks to make the same Bang!

In passing, let me add that, of course, many other factors also determine security, strength, and who would win in a war. However, in light of what I have just communicated to you, I dare to call this 5% measure absurd, irrational, and perverse, even pathological as a policy.

NATO’s Glamour Covering Intellectual Emptiness

Look at it as theatre. They arrive in limousines with high security for themselves. They dress elegantly and are guests of the royal couple. They are merely flying in, at the cost of billions, to be nicely placed at the photo opportunity.

All decisions have been made before they meet, they all play their roles and state virtually the same banalities.

They are actors on militarism’s stage, big smiles, hugs and jokes – they are such a cosy family, a success story like never told in human history.

Media that know nothing about substance, focus on certain words or details – like how Trump is referred to as ‘Daddy’ by the charming Rutte S-G. Even the press conferences is a performance.

The statement coming out of the Summit is so brief and non-argumentative that it is not worth the bandwidth you read it on.

It’s bread and circuses for the people. All these emperors wear no clothes, and their speech is unbearably predictable and banal.

Their ‘security’ means Zero Security for you and me. But you are not supposed to see it. This is the Theatre of the Absurd and War.

Nonviolent Taxpayer Disobedience

Imagine that 100s of millions of citizens in NATO and EU countries decided not to pay that percentage of their tax money which goes to the military and to this militarism. As honest and decent people, they would instead pay that percentage into a common national Fund for Conversion to Peace.

The day their government began to take security and peace – and not militarism – seriously, the accumulated funds could be released to further an alternative policy.

Now, this has to be done by millions and not a handful. If only a handful, the legal systems would be able to process this nonviolent tax break and force people to pay. However, if this was done in the millions, the legal systems would stand no chance to process all. Think of that!

After all, we are now forced to pay even more to receive even less security – for the simple reason that weapons have not led to peace – it’s rather a drug for amotionallists – and more weapons will only lead the world towards increased war risks, reduced human security and – increasingly likely – a rapidly increasing risk of war.

Militarism can not thrive without obedient, accepting – and paying – citizens. If we use our soft power, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. always advocated, we can stop this militarist madness.

Time is short! Spread the idea!

***

Now, the original argument from January 2025:

Politicians, scholars and the media unthinkingly promote this nonsense, latest President Trump at Davos. Western rational thinking is out; market thinking, hysteria, and emotionalism are in. 

With intellectual and moral disarmament, the West has become its own worst enemy. It is dangerous. It’s self-destructive.

For years, NATO’s capacity goal has been for all its members to spend 2% of their GDP on the military. To many, this would be a ceiling, but according to ex-SG Jens Stoltenberg, from the Madrid Summit in 2022 onwards, it was the floor.

This goal is a splendid indicator of the frighteningly low intellectual level on which the alliance and the Western world, in general, operate today – intellectual and moral disarmament coupled with militarist re-armament.

Why?

A defence budget shall be determined by a serious, multi-dimensional and future-oriented analysis based on a series of more or less likely scenarios: What are we challenged by the next x number of years?

Next follows a matching of probability and capacity: Threats that are too big for a country’s capacity to do something about – like being hit by nuclear weapons – or threats that are too unlikely are separated and dropped. So are threats/challenges that are too small to worry about.

Then the threat analysis is left with credible, probable future threats within a resource spectrum that the country in question can do something about. It’s based on such a detailed analysis that a government presents its threat analysis and seeks to allocate, or re-allocate, its resources to achieve optimal security given its resources.

This is the way it was done up until the end of the First Cold War. One could agree or disagree with various governments’ threat analyses and priorities, but they were published in studies of hundreds of pages, were put out for public debate and then – as long as the West practised democracy – decisions were made.

*

But what are NATO countries doing today?

They drop all this – intellectually demanding – analytical work based on numerous types of civilian and military expertise and simply set off X% of their GDP no matter what kinds of threats there are in the real world.

Mindbogglingly, they tie their military expenditures to their economic performance: If GDP increases, then military spending grows proportionately! If the GDP slides down, defence expenditures will do so, too, regardless of the perceived or actual threat environment.

It’s like setting off a certain percentage of the family income to health expenditures whether or not any family member is ill.

And absurdly, it is actually a de-coupling of adversaries: We have more to fight Russia and China with whether or not they de facto behave as adversaries. In the long run it will end in the West sinking deeper and deeper into economic crisis – and with a steadily diminished economic performance, there will – according to this counterproductive idea – be less available to the military and warfare.

The more the West spends on militarism, the more its civilian performance and power will decrease, and the less there will be for ‘security.’ But our kakistocratic militarists don’t even think that far!

NATO’s original Military Expenditures As Percentage of GDP idea is a reflection of the Western delusional idea applied in many other fields that, when there is a problem, we set off funds to solve it and pump those funds into a system, whether or not that system is functioning, functioning optimally – or not at all.

In other words, money has become the measure of problem-solving capacity and quality; changes, reforms or completely new thinking and structural reform don’t even enter the equation.

Qualities are expressed in quantitative terms. And it is the end of thinking and common sense.

The 2% goal was meaningless from Day One- Intellectual dwarfs bought it and used it again and again over the last decade or so.

Threats to a country do not move up and down according to that country’s economy. Such thinking points to the intellectual inside-the-box stagnation of an old organisation.

President Trump has just increased it to 5%. When will it be 10% in this incredibly unproductive and parasitic sector that I call the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC ? It is the cancer that eats up civilian creativity, innovation and socio-economic development and militarises us to death – while the rest of the world is whizzing along and surpassing the West.

Be sure that the higher the percentage figure gets, the faster NATO countries’ civilian economy will sink into an even deeper crisis – because the economist’s First Law is that you cannot eat the cake and have it too.

The fact that no one – except this author – has addressed this Military Expenditures As % of GDP as intellectual BS – is, in and of itself, a threat to world security. Where rational, intelligent thinking goes out, militarism and war seep in.

With Trump in the White House, the decline of the West will go even faster. That’s why he wants a Greater American from Panama to the largest possible part of Scandinavia (with 47 US bases) and Arctic.

There may come a day when Europe sees fit to open up to Russia, China, and all the other ‘bad’ guys – if they want to have anything to do with Europe. I mean, with friends like Trump and his greater America – perhaps out of NATO and 5% of economic wealth wasted completely – who will need to point to old enemies in the future?

This article is adapted from my much longer “The TFF Abolish NATO Catalogue. Abolish NATO or Convert It to Serve Peace. 30 Arguments and 100s of Inspirations” from 2022.

The original source of this article is Transnational Foundation & Jan Oberg.

The post NATO’s 5% of GDP Military Expenditures Is a 100% Indefensible and Stupid Idea appeared first on LewRockwell.

Within the storytelling of western politics and punditry there exists a fictional type of mental illness which only affects people the US empire doesn’t like.

If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, its crazy lunatic government will flip out and nuke us all.

Watch out for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, those guys are a bunch of maniacal antisemites who want to attack Israelis just because they’re Jewish.

Oh no, Putin is invading Ukraine completely unprovoked because he’s a madman who hates freedom and won’t stop until he’s conquered all of Europe.

China is building up its military because the megalomaniacal Xi Jinping wants to take over the world; all those US military bases surrounding China are just a defensive measure to contain Beijing’s insanity.

Assad just went nuts one day and started slaughtering his own people out of nowhere.

Gaddafi is a sexual sadist who’s giving Viagra to his troops to help them commit mass rapes in Libya.

Saddam Hussein is so crazy and evil he’s trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction to give Americans another 9/11.

The North Koreans used to be far too insane to be allowed to have nuclear weapons because they’d nuke San Francisco immediately, but after they obtained nuclear weapons they were miraculously cured of this rare psychological disorder.

The stories of the western empire ask us to believe that everyone who finds themselves in the imperial crosshairs is an irrational actor whose loony behavior can only be attributed to some uncontrollable defect within their own minds, or who will soon snap and do something nutty if they are not contained by force.

One antagonist who never appears in these fairy tales of the western empire is the western empire itself. In the storytelling of the empire, there is no globe-spanning power structure which is constantly inflicting violence and destruction upon populations around the world while seeking to crush any nation who disobeys its dictates. It’s just a bunch of irrational psychos, seeking nuclear weapons and becoming aggressively militaristic for no other reason than because they are crazy, while the totally normal alliance led by a totally normal country in North America innocently responds to their crazy behavior.

That’s the story. In real life, the most aggressive and unreasonable actor on the world stage by far is the empire-like power structure that is loosely centralized around Washington DC. Nobody else is constantly waging wars of aggression around the world. Nobody else is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases for the purpose of global domination. Nobody else has spent the 21st century killing millions of people and deliberately targeting civilians with starvation sanctions in countries on the other side of the planet. Only the US-centralized empire has been doing these things.

But we are asked to believe that this vicious imperial power structure is the only rational actor on earth, and that those who resist its aggressions are the crazy ones.

And you are told that if you can’t see this, then you’re crazy too. You’re a crackpot. A conspiracy theorist. A paranoid nutball whose voice should be marginalized and whose ideas should be dismissed with a scoff.

You are crazy if you don’t believe what the world’s craziest power structure says about its enemies being crazy.

It is gaslighting on a global scale. It is madness, and that is why this civilization has gone mad.

Let’s hope someone finds a way to protect the world from the insanity of the western empire.

______________

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Perhaps the greatest achievement of capitalism is the creation of the phenomenon of leisure, which has become the object of cultural recognition and celebration in modern capitalist countries.

For millennia prior to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe, the vast majority of men, women, and children toiled from dusk to dawn and beyond just to keep body and soul together. Leisure as we know it today did not exist except among kings and lords of the manor and their retainers. For ordinary people there were only brief respites from their labor on Sundays and holidays, during which they fulfilled their religious obligations. It was the enormous increase in the productivity of labor unleashed by the capitalist mode of production that bestowed meaningful “leisure time” on the masses, which has been celebrated in cultural media since the end of World War II. Because rock music is one of my favorite cultural media, I will analyze two classic songs recorded in the mid-1960s that recognize the close relationship between capitalism and leisure. Before I do so, however, I would like to say a word about the economics of leisure.

We tend to take leisure for granted because its production is instantaneous and its consumption is intermingled so closely with the consumption of the services of other goods in the form of “leisure activities.” Leisure is time that we choose to spend not working and therefore excludes the resting time physiologically required to restore the energy we need to function as acting beings. Working out at a health club, entertaining friends with a dinner party, and religious worship all require leisure as a complementary good. However, leisure is a good that cannot be bought and sold on the market. Like romantic love, friendship, and good reputation, it is also a (non-exchangeable) consumer goods because it is scarce and contributes directly to satisfying human wants and desires. Furthermore, just as spending money on exchangeable goods is costly, spending time on leisure activities also involves a cost. The cost of leisure is not directly monetary but rather the forgone opportunity to earn money from selling one’s labor services on the market to a business firm or laboring in one’s own business. For example, if a home care nurse earns $40 per hour and can vary her time worked in four-hour shifts, then it “costs” her $160 (before taxes) in forgone wages to “purchase” four additional hours of leisure by reducing her working hours from 36 to 32 hours per week.

Although leisure can be “produced” only by the person who intends to consume it and cannot be purchased from other people, the demand for leisure is subject to the same law of economics that governs the demand for exchangeable goods, namely, the “law of marginal utility.” This law states that as the supply of a good an individual possesses increases, the personal or “subjective” value he attaches to the good declines relative to the subjective values of other goods. Applied to the case we are about to consider, this law implies that as workers’ wages increase, enabling them to purchase greater quantities of consumer goods on the market, an hour of leisure tends to become relatively more valuable. This increases their willingness to “purchase” additional hours of leisure by reducing their hours worked and forgoing the wages they could have earned.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, which was ushered in by the ideology and system of capitalism, the astounding increase in saving and investment in capital goods and improvements in technology has driven labor productivity and real wages sharply upward. For example, as the graph below indicates, average weekly real wages—the amount of goods and services an average laborer could purchase with his or her weekly earnings—in the United Kingdom increased almost 20 times from 1800 to 2014. (An interactive version of the graph is here.)

In the United States, where the industrial revolution started much later than in Great Britain, the graph below shows that real average annual earnings of non-farm employees rose by 30 percent from 1865 to 1890. By 1988, an alternative index of real average hourly earnings in manufacturing in the United States was 55 times greater than it was in 1890. (An explanation and interactive version of the following graph is here.)

As real wages continued their dizzying rise, driven by rapidly increasing capital investment and industrialization, they were spent on acquiring the expanding supplies of consumer’s goods cascading onto markets. As noted, the subjective value of these goods tended to decline on laborers’ personal value scales relative to the value of leisure. To prevent an imbalance or “disequilibrium” of value between leisure and exchangeable goods from developing, laborers chose to progressively increase the proportion of their wages devoted to the purchase of leisure by reducing labor hours exchanged for wages on the market. In the example of the home care nurse above, the equilibrium of value between leisure and other consumer goods is restored when the subjective value of an additional four hours of leisure roughly equals—or more exactly, just exceeds—the value of $160 dollars of wages sacrificed or any collection of goods she could have purchased with that sum of money. If the nurse were to trade off any more wages for leisure, then her welfare would be reduced because the value of the added hours of leisure would drop below the additional wages and consumers goods she would have to forgo.

Let us look at how this adjustment process of leisure to the rise in real wages has played out historically. As the graph below shows, in the United States in 1870, production workers averaged 3,096 hours of labor per year. By 2017, the average annual working hours per worker had fallen to 1,755, a decline of over 43 percent. For the United Kingdom over the same period, these figures were 2,755 hours and 1,670 hours, respectively, a decline of nearly 40 percent in annual working hours. For the United States, almost three-quarters, or 31 percentage points of the 43 percentage-point decline in annual working hours during nearly a century-and-a-half, occurred during the 38 years from 1913 through 1950. In the United Kingdom, during the same 18-year period, annual working hours fell by nearly one-half of their total decline from1870 through 2017. (An explanation and interactive version of the following graph is here.)

By the advent of the 1960s, the notions of “the weekend” and “quitting time” or the “end of the workday” began to be portrayed in the news and cultural media as a cause and opportunity for celebration. Two rock songs released in the mid-1960s vividly illustrate this phenomenon. The first is titled “Five O’Clock World” (sometimes written “5 O’Clock World”) and was recorded by the American pop group The Vogues. The record, which can be heard here, peaked at number 4 on the Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in January 1966.

The lyrics of the first verse of the song laments the physical and mental anguish caused by the workday:

Up every morning just to keep a job
I gotta fight my way through the hustling mob
Sounds of the city pounding in my brain
While another day goes down the drain

The first chorus quickly transitions to an account of the worker’s eager anticipation of the end of the workday when he will emerge as literally a new person, stepping out of his work clothes and into a radically different world of leisure and consumption activities.

But it’s a five o’clock world when the whistle blows
No-one owns a piece of my time
And there’s a five o’clock me inside my clothes
Thinking that the world looks fine, yeah

The second verse transports us back to the workday world:

Trading my time for the pay I get
Living on money that I ain’t made yet
Gotta keep goin’ gotta make my way
But I live for the end of the day

The foregoing lyric refers to two capitalist institutions that helped make possible the enormous increase in labor productivity and real wages. First, there is the wages system itself, wherein workers voluntarily “trade their time” for money payment. The variation in wages rates among the different lines of production indicates to workers where their value to consumers and their own compensation are highest, while permitting them to choose the job that best suits them considering their personal preferences for particular working conditions. Then, there are the credit markets that enable workers with prospects of increasing incomes to borrow money in exchange for an interest premium and to enjoy a standard of living in the present that is higher than their current wages would permit. In terms of the lyrics, they are “living on money they ain’t made yet.” More importantly, capital markets, which include credit markets, prompt entrepreneurs to invest the continually increasing flow of scarce savings and capital in those production processes that increase workers’ productivity and raise their real wages. And it is precisely the astonishing increase in real wages under capitalism that has created “the five o’clock world” and allowed workers, in the words of the last line of the verse, “to live for the end of the day”—rather than face the grim prospect of returning home taking some nourishment and slumping into bed utterly exhausted.

In creating the world of leisure, capitalism also gave rise to the flourishing of family life and romantic love, for most people highly-valued goods whose consumption requires leisure. Fittingly, the song ends with a celebration of leisure, “the five o’clock world,” as an indispensable means for attaining these goods:

‘Cause it’s a five o’clock world when the whistle blows
No-one owns a piece of my time
And there’s a long-haired girl who waits, I know
To ease my troubled mind, yeah! . . .
In my five o’clock world she waits for me
Nothing else matters at all
‘Cause every time my baby smiles at me
I know that it’s all worthwhile, yeah

The second song that pertains to our theme is “Friday on My Mind.” Performed by the Australian rock band The Easybeats, the record, which can be heard here, was released in 1966 and reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in May 1967 in the United States. It was a worldwide hit and, in 2001, was voted “Best Australian Song” of all time by APRA (Australasian Performing Right Association).

The lyrics begin with the worker’s subjective reaction to the drudgery of the work week and reveal his laser-like focus on the arrival of the weekend and the variations in his mood as it approaches:

Monday mornin’ feels so bad
Everybody seems to nag me
Comin’ Tuesday I feel better
Even my old man looks good
Wednesday just don’t go
Thursday goes too slow
I’ve got Friday on my mind

The chorus that follows celebrates the arrival of Friday evening and the worker’s impending physical and emotional release from the work week. It also alludes to two capitalist institutions that facilitate and promote the consumption of the leisure activities the worker longs for: the city and money (“bread”).

Gonna have fun in the city
Be with my girl, she’s so pretty . . .
Tonight I’ll spend my bread, tonight
I’ll lose my head, tonight
I’ve got to get to night
Monday I’ll have Friday on my mind

In the pre-industrial world, “the city” meant the capital city where the king and his family and court were ensconced. The capital was built and subsisted on the wealth that was expropriated by the ruling class through taxation of the producers—the craftsmen, artisans, and farmers inhabiting the towns and rural communities. It also served as the playground for the monarch and his royal cronies where they frolicked and cavorted, disgorging their ill-gotten gains on their leisure pursuits. Capitalism transformed cities from pleasure preserves for the politically powerful and privileged to centers of industry, finance, commerce, and entertainment where workers, capitalists, and entrepreneurs produced and then consumed the ever-increasing fruits of their efforts. The expansion and multiplication of cities under capitalism enabled and were driven by the expansion of the money economy until it encompassed all households and businesses. Money became the universal medium of exchange and money wages the “open sesame” for the masses to access the consumer goods—including things formerly considered “luxuries”—that gushed forth from capitalist mass production while indulging in the diversions and pleasures of leisure previously reserved to the ruling elites.

The second verse of the song again bemoans the tedium of the work week but suggests a prospective escape from traditional employment—but not from productive effort—via another capitalist institution:

Do the five day grind once more
I know of nothin’ else that bugs me
More than workin’ for the rich man
Hey! I’ll change that scene one day
Today I might be mad, tomorrow I’ll be glad
‘Cause I’ll have Friday on my mind

The “rich man” who irks and maddens the employee is, of course, the entrepreneur. In vowing to “change that scene one day,” the worker is declaring his intention to go to work for himself, to become an upstart entrepreneur, to out-compete the existing “rich men.” The song concludes with a repeat of the chorus with the worker keenly anticipating the imminent arrival of Friday evening mere hours away where await the delights and gratifications of the weekend.

Gonna have fun in the city
Be with my girl, she’s so pretty . . . .
Tonight I’ll spend my bread, tonight
I’ll lose my head, tonight
I’ve got to get to night
Monday I’ll have Friday on my mind

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

The post Two Sixties Rock Songs That Celebrate Capitalism’s Greatest Creation appeared first on LewRockwell.

Robert Barnes has often spoken of how today’s perilous geopolitical situation is reminiscent of that on the eve of the Great War (World War I). Cloistered and insular political elites are displaying the same willful ignorance and haughty arrogance, the same incompetence and destructive disdain for future unintended consequences, as those earlier pompous leaders of Germany, Great Britain, Austria-Hungry, France, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Czarist Russia, and the United States of America did then. Below are three famous observers lamenting on the Realpolitik consequences of this deadly folly:

Winston Churchill. statement to William Griffen, editor of the New York Enquirer in August of 1936

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t to-day be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”

America’s greatest journalist, H L Mencken on World War I

Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 11, 1931, “A Bad Guess,” H. L. Mencken

“Most of England’s appalling troubles today are due to a bad guess: she went into the war on the wrong side in 1914. The theory of her statesmen, in those days, was that, by joining France and Russia, she would give a death-blow to a dangerous rival, Germany, and so be free to run the world. But the scheme failed to work; moreover, it had unexpected and almost fatal results. Not only did Germany come out of the mess a dangerous rival still; France also became a rival, and a very formidable one. Worse, the United States was pumped up to immense proportions, and began to challenge England’s control of the world’s markets. The results are now visible: England has three competitors instead of one, and is steadily going downhill. If she had gone into the war on the German side she’d be in a much better situation today. The Germans would be grateful for the help and willing to pay for it (while the French are not); the French would be down and out, and hence unable to menace the peace of Europe; Germany would have Russia in Europe and there would be no Bolshevik [communist] nuisance; England would have all of Siberia and Central Asia, and there would be no Japanese threat and no Indian revolt; and the United States would still be a docile British colony, as it was in 1914. . . .

“The United States made a similar mistake in 1917. Our real interests at the time were on the side of the Germans, whose general attitude of mind is far more American than that of any other people. If we had gone in on their side, England would be moribund today, and the dreadful job of pulling her down, which will now take us forty or filthy years, would be over. We’d have a free hand in the Pacific, and Germany would be running the whole [European] Continent like a house of correction. In return for our connivance there she’d be glad to give us whatever we wanted elsewhere. There would be no Bolshevism [communism] in Russia and no Fascism in Italy. Our debtors would all be able to pay us. The Japs would be docile, and we’d be reorganizing Canada and probably also Australia. But we succumbed to a college professor [Wilson] who read Matthew Arnold, just as the English succumbed to a gay old dog who couldn’t bear to think of Prussian MP’s shutting down the Paris night-clubs.

“As for the mistake the Russians made, I leave it to history.”

And world-renowned economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard, in Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy:

“American entry into World War I in April 1917 prevented negotiated peace between the warring powers and drove the Allies forward into a peace of unconditional surrender and dismemberment, a peace which, as we have seen, set the stage for World War II. American entry thus cost countless lives on both sides, caused chaos and disruption throughout central and eastern Europe at war’s end, and the consequent rise of Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism to power in Europe. In this way, Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the war may have been the single most fateful action of the twentieth century, causing untold and unending misery and destruction. But Morgan profits were expanded and assured.”

The post Elite Arrogance, Incompetence and Willful Ignorance Leading to Unintended Consequences appeared first on LewRockwell.

The biggest battle in US Army history was the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive. This World War I battle is rarely mentioned in our media and school history books. Once a million American draftees were assembled for combat in France, they were ordered to charge into the strongest German positions, resulting in 26,277 American soldiers slaughtered in just 47 days. My grandfather, Eden C. Burris, Sr., after serving with General John J. Pershing in his campaign in Mexico chasing after the bandit Pancho Villa, later accompanied Pershing to France where he fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive described above. I well remember his regaling me with his World War I exploits when I was a young adolescent.

Related Tale: “The 1914 American Invasion of Mexico”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZQGt…

“Winston Churchill was responsible for tragic Lusitania sinking”; John Spain: https://www.irishcentral.com/news/iri…

“World War I: Wasted Lives on Armistice Day”; History Net; https://www.historynet.com/world-war-…

“Meuse-Argonne Offensive”; video from the National Archives; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hhKk…

World War I: A Revisionist Reading List —  by David Gordon

Royal Cousins at War

Episode 1: A House Divided

Examines what impact the relationships between cousins Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and George V of the United Kingdom had on the outbreak of the First World War. This episode focuses on the story of the emerging divisions and rivalries between the inter-related royal houses of Europe during the 19th century.

Episode 2: Into the Abyss

The realignment of the European powers and the emergence of the alliance system in the years following the death of Queen Victoria, played a significant role for the three monarchs in the frantic, desperate days of July and August 1914.

Cousins at War  — Article

In May 1910, the monarchies of Europe came together in London, in an opulent show of strength, for the funeral of Edward VII. War and revolution in the ensuing decade heaped assassination, defeat and exile upon them. Author Theo Aronson portrays the European Royal Families at War.

The WWI Conspiracy – Part One: To Start A War — Documentary

The WWI Conspiracy – Part Two: The American Front — Documentary

The WWI Conspiracy – Part Three: A New World Order — Documentary

History Is Written By The Winners — Documentary

People’s Century: 1914 Killing Fields — Documentary

They Shall Not Grow Old — Documentary

I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier — Popular Song Before American Intervention In World War I

World War I: The American Legacy — Documentary

Trench Warfare — Documentary

World War I: Tactics And Strategy — Documentary

World War One Resources

The Christmas Truce of 1914 — Documentaries

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 1: Explosion — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 2: Stalemate — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – Episode 3: Total War — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 4: Slaughter — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 5: Mutiny –– Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – episode 6: Collapse — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – Episode 7: Hunger and Hatred — Documentary

The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century – Episode 8: War Without End – Documentary

Who Was Edward M. House?  — Article by Robert Higgs

Phillip Dru, Administrator — Anonymous (Edward Mandel House)

The Intimate Papers of Colonel House — Book by Charles Seymour (editor)

Triumphant Plutocracy; the Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920, Book by Richard Franklin Pettigrew

Your Country At War and What happens To You After A War, Book by Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.

How Diplomats Make War — Book by Francis Neilson

The United States and World War I — Article by John J. Dwyer

World War I and the Suppression of Dissent, Part 1 and II — Articles by Wendy McElroy

The Sinking of the Lusitania — Article by Kurt Hyde

Hidden History of WW1 — A transcript of the Lew Rockwell Show with John V. Denson.

Heritage of the Great War — Comprehensive WWI Website

Woodrow Wilson and World War I  — Murray N. Rothbard (audio lecture)

World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals — Murray N. Rothbard article

War Collectivism in World War I  — Book by Murray N. Rothbard

More than any other single period, World War I was the critical watershed for the American business system. It was a “war collectivism,” a totally planned economy run largely by big-business interests through the instrumentality of the central government, which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry — Book by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen

Here is the archetype of all post–World War I revisionism of a particular variety: the hunt for the people who made the big bucks off the killing machine. The Merchants of Death was, in many ways, the manifesto of a generation of people who swore there would not be and could not be another such war.

But here is the kicker: it was co-authored by the founder of Human Events, the conservative weekly. So this is no left-wing screed against profiteering. It is a careful and subtle, but still passionate, attack on those who would use government to profit themselves at the expense of other people’s lives and property.

Here is a sample of the ideological orientation: “The arms industry did not create the war system. On the contrary, the war system created the arms industry.… All constitutions in the world vest the war-making power in the government or in the representatives of the people. The root of the trouble, therefore, goes far deeper than the arms industry. It lies in the prevailing temper of peoples toward nationalism, militarism, and war, in the civilization which forms this temper and prevents any drastic and radical change. Only when this underlying basis of the war system is altered, will war and its concomitant, the arms industry, pass out of existence.”

This book is a wonderful example of what Rothbard called the “Old Right” in its best form. The book not only makes the case against the war machine; it provides a scintillating history of war profiteering, one authoritative enough for citation and academic study. One can see how this book had such a powerful effect.

Why re-release this book now? The war profiteers are making money as never before. They are benefiting from conflict as never before. Everything in this book has not only come to pass but as been made worse by a million times. So this treatise is more necessary than ever.

This is the real heritage of the American Right.

Merchants of Death Revisited: Armaments, Bankers, and the First World War — T. Hunt Tooley article

The year 2004 marked the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Engelbrecht and Hanighen’s Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry, a book that made it into the general consciousness of most thinking Americans by the mid-twentieth century. The stark language of the title no doubt contributed to its fame. Moreover, the theme of arms merchants pushing for war is both easily understood and easily discussed, even by those who have not read it.

The World at War (Ralph Raico) — Video Lecture

The late Ralph Raico was a specialist in European classical liberalism and Austrian Economics. He learned economics under Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Friedrich Hayek, and was professor emeritus of history at Buffalo State College.

In this lecture, Raico teaches a Cato Summer Seminar group the history of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. He offers an in-depth look at the conditions which led to both wars and the ways in which governments throughout the 20th century have used war powers to justify and fuel their expansion.

Aftermath of the Great War — documentaries

Paris 1919, Part 1 — Feature Film

Paris 1919, Part 2 — Feature Film

War Is A Racket, by Smedley Darlington Butler

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Click Here:

Ben Bartee

 

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Click here:

The MAHA Report

 

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David Martin wrote:

“Zionism is a genocidal movement.”

Iran will not become a part of Yankeelandia anytime soon.

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Trump yes, but don’t forget Harry Truman. On this day in 1950, Truman announced that he was ordering his personal attack force, the U.S. military, to go fight in Korea. Over 36,000 American soldiers died, as usual, in vain and for a lie. What if American troops had all simply said, North Korea is no threat to us, hell no, we won’t go? I don’t know what would have happened in Korea, but I know that the families of over 36,000 American soldiers would not have lost fathers, brothers, sons, and uncles for no good reason.

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