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President Trump has been holding talks with top advisors this week regarding potential US attacks on Venezuela in order to bring about regime change in yet another oil-rich nation.

As the western political/media class frames Venezuela’s President Maduro as a “dictator” who must urgently be removed from power, it is worth noting that any US military operation to remove him would be taking place directly against the will of the American public. A recent CBS News poll found that seventy percent of Americans “would oppose” the US taking military action against Venezuela.

So here we have the president of a nation which calls itself a democracy, holding meetings to plan military operations which are completely and unambiguously against the wishes of the electorate, in the name of removing a dictator and spreading freedom and democracy.

Interesting.

Trump Holds Talks With Top Advisers on Venezuela Amid Push Toward Regime Change War
The president reportedly told Maduro he must relinquish power during a recent phone call#Venezuela #Trump #Maduro https://t.co/AEbqYltJCh

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) December 2, 2025

Whenever I see the US empire saying they plan to remove the latest Official Bad Guy from power in order to liberate a nation from tyranny, I always want to ask, what is tyranny?

Is it tyranny to constantly topple foreign governments by force if their leaders disobey you?

Is it tyranny to circle the planet with hundreds of military bases in order to dominate all of humanity?

Is it tyranny to continuously be inflicting mass military slaughter, backing genocides, staging foreign coups, fomenting unrest and uprisings in foreign nations, meddling in foreign elections, funding proxy conflicts, imposing blockades and starvation sanctions on civilian populations, and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship in order to rule the world?

Is it tyranny to treat the entire global south as your personal piggy bank from which to extract limitless labor and resources and murder anyone who tries to inhibit these practices through any movement toward national sovereignty?

Because if it is, it’s a bit silly for the US to claim to be liberating any nation from tyranny.

Kinda like a morbidly obese man coming up to you and saying he’ll train you to shed those extra pounds.

It’s like Nick Fuentes offering cultural sensitivity training workshops.

It’s like the Green River Killer publishing a book on the the importance of combating toxic masculinity.

The US empire is the most tyrannical power structure on earth, by an extremely massive margin. There is no close second place in contention. Nobody else is brutalizing and terrorizing the entire planet into compliance with its dictates. No other power is constantly assaulting any government or population anywhere on earth that doesn’t bow to its demands. Only the US empire can be said to be guilty of this.

Even if Maduro really was the worst dictator on earth (he’s not), and even if this push for regime change really had anything to do with liberating the Venezuelan people (it doesn’t), and even if you could make a convincing argument that regime change interventionism would probably make things better for Venezuelans (you can’t), the US would be the last government on earth with any business doing so. The world’s most tyrannical power structure has no business trying to liberate anyone from tyranny.

If the US empire wants to make the world less tyrannical, its first and only move should be to dismantle itself.

_________________

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

The post World’s Most Tyrannical Government Wants To Free Venezuela From Tyranny appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 1998, I was invited to join the Napoleonic Society of America by an eccentric man who had converted his large office into a shrine dedicated to the French general and emperor. A vast conference table was decked with models of Napoleon’s famous victories at Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram, which the peculiar man showed me with extraordinary enthusiasm.

“What do you think about Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812?” I asked.

“A regrettable mistake,” the man said, suddenly becoming sober. “He underestimated the resolve of Alexander I and the hardness of the Russian winter.”

“How many of his soldiers paid the price for his underestimation?” I asked.

“No one knows exactly,” he replied.

This is true. Estimates of the size of the Grande Armée that crossed the Neman River into Russia in June 1812 vary widely between 500 and and 600 thousand. Six months later, only 120,000 returned, and most of these had suffered severe injuries and amputations from frostbite.

In other words, around 400,000 young soldiers from Western Europe were condemned to suffer unfathomably painful deaths to serve the monstrous vanity and ambition of a single man.

These were mostly conscripted farm boys and tradesmen from all over Napoleon’s European possessions—sons, husbands, and fathers who were needed back home to take care of their parents, wives, and children. The suffering they endured before death finally took them is unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

Letters that some wrote to their mothers and wives shortly before they died were subsequently found on their dead bodies and saved in archives. They are heartbreaking to read. One young officer recorded his anguish at watching his beloved horse die of starvation. Another boy writes to his mom that he misses her cooking, as he hasn’t eaten anything but lousy quarter rations for days on end.

Given the strategic brilliance that Napoleon had displayed earlier in his career, it’s an astonishing fact that all of his assumptions about the prospects of his Russian campaign were dead wrong.

Russia wasn’t Austria or the principalities of Germany, but a vast, sparsely populated country that couldn’t provide enough food and fodder for so many men and horses under the best of circumstances.

On top of this, Tsar Alexander I and his generals were determined to make life as hard as possible for Napoleon’s army. The Russians didn’t just strategically retreat—they burned all of the grain and drove all the livestock east so that Napoleon’s men would have nothing to sustain them on the long eastward march to Moscow.

And then, in what may be the toughest sacrifice ever made, the Russians burned Moscow to the ground instead of surrendering it to Napoleon.

Alexander’s message to the Emperor of the French was clear—namely, “I would rather sacrifice everything than surrender to you. Fuck you Napoleon Bonaparte and the horse you rode in on.”

With nothing to support the army in Moscow, Napoleon had no choice but to abandon the city to retreat back to the Neman River that bordered the Duchy of Warsaw, over 1000 kilometers away.

Even then, his decision-making was incredibly wanton. Instead of quickly recognizing that his situation was untenable, he waited till October 19—just before the terrible Russian winter set in. Moscow lies at 55 degrees north of the equator, just three degrees south of Juneau, Alaska.

Heavy, cold rains fell on October 22, making the roads muddy and difficult to trudge with their remaining equipment, weapons, and stores packed into heavy carts. The first snow fell on November 3.

Napoleon’s advisor, Armand de Caulaincourt, described what it was like for the woefully equipped and provisioned soldiers when night fell and temperatures dropped as low as minus 35 degrees Celsius.

The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire! Furthermore, disorganization was perceptibly gaining ground in the Guard. One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand. They begged one to let them alone. Once these poor wretches fell asleep they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep, another passer-by would help them along a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while, but not saving them, for in this condition the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistibly strong.

This was payback time for the Russians, and their fabled Cossack cavalry had a ball harassing the retreating army, attacking the exhausted and starving soldiers with lances and sabers, literally hacking them to pieces.

On December 5, Napoleon abandoned his army by sled, leaving his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat in command. On December 14, what was left of the once grand army left Russian territory.

The lesson from Napoleon’s 1812 campaign (and Hitler’s 1941 campaign) is clear — France, Germany, and the UK should show greater respect to Russia.

Approximately 700,000 Russians (soldiers and civilians) died as a result of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion. In 1941, Hitler’s army is estimated to have killed or wounded six million Russian soldiers. Fourteen million Russian civilians are estimated to have died from violence, famine, and exposure after their homes were destroyed.

Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa was launched from Poland and through Ukraine, with around 250,000 Ukrainian nationalist soldiers joining the German Army to attack Russia. Ukraine’s Azov Battalion traces its lineage to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Its leader, Stepan Bandera, was a notorious Nazi collaborator.

The bloody-minded fools in charge of U.S. and European foreign policy should have thought about these historical facts before they armed and trained the Ukrainian military to serve as NATO’s attack dog against Russia.

Especially bizarre has been the German government’s decision to repudiate the excellent and mutually beneficial German-Russian friendship cultivated by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Vladimir Putin, and the great and useful fruit of their friendship, the Nord Stream Pipeline.

I am confident that an Austrian-style neutrality deal for Ukraine would have averted the disaster of the last four years. With Russian forces now just 75 miles east of the great Black Sea port of Odessa, it appears that the West is now on the cusp of suffering its greatest strategic defeat since December 1812.

Europe’s leaders apparently learned nothing from Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 campaign, and they now seem determined to pursue war with Russia. President Trump should tell them to cease their agitations and mind their own business before they get a lot more people killed.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Napoleon’s 1812 Russian Campaign: Masterclass in Pigheadedness appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recent headlines touting the superior efficacy of Pfizer’s mRNA flu vaccine ignore Pfizer’s own findings that for those over 65 years old, their mRNA product is more dangerous than standard influenza vaccines, which are already ineffective and harmful.

The reason for the misreporting by legacy media as well as the prominent New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is because Pfizer buried the results of its product testing on seniors, which showed heightened adverse effects from the drug. 

The “results are so bad that it is not clear whether the Food and Drug Administration could or would possibly approve an mRNA shot based on this data,” wrote journalist and COVID shot watchdog Alex Berenson. “Pfizer appears to know very well that these results are disastrous.”

“Pfizer has never announced the results, sitting on them for years,” reported Berenson in his Substack. “They show older adults who received mRNA had MORE flu infections, deaths, and side effects than those who got a standard flu shot.”

As such, Pfizer’s mRNA flu vaccine will likely not be approved by Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“An mRNA flu shot failed in seniors,” FDA commissioner Dr. Marty Makary told Fox News over the weekend. “The trial showed zero benefit.”

“We’re not just going to rubber-stamp new products that don’t work, that fail in a clinical trial. It makes a mockery of science if we’re just going to rubber-stamp things with no data,” said Makary.

“That was the MO (modus operandi) in the Biden administration,” he added.

The hidden findings are beyond jarring for the elderly. According to Berenson:

Older people who got mRNA shots were about 6 percent more likely to get the flu than those who got standard shots. And 49 older people who received the mRNA shot died, compared to 46 who received the flu shot.

The study also revealed a significant safety signal for the mRNAs on kidney damage. Twenty-two older patients who received the mRNA shot were diagnosed with acute kidney injury, chronic kidney disease, or end-stage renal disease, compared to nine who received the standard shot.

In another worrisome finding, 17 older people who received mRNA suffered “acute respiratory failure,” compared to only six who received the standard flu shot.

mRNA patients were also much more likely to have less serious side effects. For example, about 69 percent reported injection-site swelling or other local side effects after the jab, compared to 26 percent who received the flu shot.

“I find this to be a major integrity failure in the peer-review process. The NEJM editorial board should provide a clear explanation how this failure has occurred and … require the authors to correct the current articles and report on the entire results of the trial,” Retsef Levi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told The Epoch Times.

“Once again, when proper trials are run, they show mRNA-based vaccines for healthy people are not ready for prime time and will likely never be,” Berenson concluded.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post Pfizer mRNA Flu Shot Linked to Serious Side Effects, Especially in Seniors appeared first on LewRockwell.

With a changing economy, artificial intelligence (AI) replacing many jobs, and widespread unpreparedness for the job market, the time-honored tradition of tossing their caps in the air to celebrate earning their degrees and starting exciting new careers has turned into disappointment for many college graduates.

Statistics released by the Department of Labor on Nov. 20 show that 25 percent of the 7.6 million unemployed Americans in September held at least a bachelor’s degree.

With more than 1.9 million unemployed college graduates on the market, the September data show little or no change from that of August in major industries to which young degree-holders typically gravitate. These include financial activities, professional and business services, wholesale and retail trade, the federal government, and transportation.

The seasonally adjusted overall unemployment rate was 4.4 percent in September, while the rate for degree holders rose to 2.8 percent from 2.7 percent in August—well above the 2.3 percent recorded in September 2024.

Frustrated With Job Search

Stacey Cohen, author of Brand Up 2.0: Propel Your Early Career Success, has been working with college graduates, and even high school students, to prepare them for future careers.

“I’ve been talking with many recent graduates and a lot of them are frustrated and upset about not finding a job yet,” she told The Epoch Times. “They feel like they’ve worked so hard over the past four years and now nobody wants them.”

Cohen believes the current situation, with so many unemployed college graduates, could be the result of several factors, including a changing economy, AI replacing many entry-level jobs, and graduates who may be unprepared for the job market. “One graduate told me about sending hundreds of resumes out and not hearing back from anyone,” she said.

Cohen noted that some graduates she has counseled have taken side jobs—such as waitressing, golf caddying, or other temporary work—while continuing their search for a permanent position. “It’s better to have some job experience on your resume—you don’t want any big gaps in there,” she said.

A recent graduate with a B.A. in Business Administration was among many expressing frustration on online forums.

“Since graduating, I’ve submitted over 1,300 applications to white collar jobs with multiple iterations of a resume, and have only gotten one offer that required a relocation that I could not afford,” the post stated. “ I worked at McDonalds for a couple of months, but didn’t last long there.”

Another user was still seeking a job after graduating in June.

“I have done internships, projects, and even graduated with honors,” the post noted. “I can’t land a single job even though I’ve sent hundreds of applications. This whole job search has been taking a blow out of my self-esteem and it makes me feel like I worked hard for nothing.”

Biggest Hurdle in Job Hunt

Cohen, who is also CEO and founder of Co-Communications, a New York-based marketing firm, said that when it comes to the job hunt, the biggest hurdle is getting your resume in front of a human being.

“It’s not because they’re unqualified—it’s because so many companies now rely on AI filters to scan resumes before they’re even seen by human eyes,” she said. “Unfortunately, this is the new normal and what early career professionals are up against.”

Cohen suggested that job seekers take greater care by fully reading the job description and tailoring their resume to fit this changed hiring landscape by using the best keywords.

For example, Cohen noted, if someone has experience in social media promotions and the position calls for “social media content creation,” it’s important to use that exact phrase in the resume so it will be picked up by AI and, hopefully, seen by an interviewer.

“This means changing up your resume and cover letter for each potential job,” she said. “It’s a lot of work, but if you streamline your list, you can do it.  Remember, it’s quality over quantity.”

Cohen has written and presented on topics ranging from optimizing a resume for algorithms to the importance of creating a LinkedIn profile and networking at business events.

“Graduates seeking employment should also attend business networking events with their parents—I see this all the time now,” she said. “Get to know the decision-makers and start to create your own contact lists.”

Cohen also recommended that parents support their children during the job search.

“Offer to run a mock interview or proofread a résumé, but more importantly, remind them that rejection is not a reflection of their worth,” she said. “It’s merely a signal to refine the strategy, not abandon the goal.”

Most importantly, she said, new graduates must be able to answer the simple question: “Why should we choose you?”

“A lot of these young people don’t realize what their superpower is and how to effectively communicate that,” she added. “Marketing yourself is just like marketing a product or service—let people know what makes you stand out from the rest.”

The Bigger Picture

Rachel Merritt, senior director of career services and employer development at Ancora Education, told The Epoch Times that Gen Z graduates’ concerns about the job market are indeed valid.

“AI is automating many of the basic, entry-level roles that used to help people get their foot in the door, so breaking in has become harder than in the past,” she said. “Also, many companies have experience requirements that most young adults haven’t had the chance to gain yet, so even roles that should be accessible often aren’t.”

Based in Arlington, Texas, Ancora Education offers technical training programs in health care, IT, business, and skilled trades.

Merritt noted that too often, college graduates are also faced with the financial pressure of repaying student loans and need money quickly. When such roles are not available, she noted, it makes them feel that the traditional college-to-career path is less reliable than it was for previous generations.

“This could delay promotions, salary growth, and major financial milestones like buying a house,” she added.

As a result, Merritt said, many younger people are now turning to skilled trades, health care, or technical certifications that can lead to jobs, higher starting salaries, and faster advancement.

A recent Resume Builder survey found that four in 10 Gen-Z college graduates were considering blue collar jobs for security.

“They have seen Millennials graduate from traditional college and be saddled with student loan debt and very few job opportunities,” Merritt said. “Trade schools have a much lower cost and higher [return on investment], a larger pool of open jobs and good starting wages.”

According to Merritt, Ancora has seen an influx of young people pursuing skilled trades training in HVAC, electrical work, welding, and plumbing. She said that Gen Zers are choosing paths that are in demand and offer faster entry into the workplace without years of debt from college expenses.

Opting for Smaller Colleges

Andrew Crapuchettes, CEO and founder of Idaho-based Red Balloon, one of the county’s largest job boards connecting employers with potential employees, told The Epoch Times that the shift toward blue collar jobs could have a substantial impact on colleges over the next 10 years.

“Based on the current unemployment situation for college grads, there seems to be a dramatic decrease in demand for college education today,” he said. “I’m predicting we could see hundreds of colleges actually go out of business over the next decade.”

According to Appily, a college locator website, there are currently more than 6,500 colleges across the United States, of which 1,995 are considered public universities. Of those, 1,626 are degree-granting.

The Education Data Initiative lists the average cost of a college education today at $38,270 per student, per year, including tuition, books, supplies, and daily living expenses. The data research organization indicates these costs have more than doubled since the beginning of the 21st century.

“Considering student loan interest and lost potential income, investing in a bachelor’s degree can ultimately cost in excess of $500,000,” the website states.

“There’s definitely a demographic shift, and I see more and more students deciding that a four-year degree just doesn’t make sense,” Crapuchettes said. “So many now are opting to go directly into the labor market.”

Except for physicians and other skilled medical professionals, attorneys, engineers, and other specialists, Crapuchettes believes there will be less need for white collar jobs in the future, but a growing need for trade jobs such as plumbers, electricians, steamfitters, auto service and solar panel technicians, heavy machinery operators, and others.

He noted that his company is seeing a mix of job openings across industries, ranging from biotech to hospitality and manufacturing. However, many employers are opting to hire graduates from smaller colleges instead of larger, well-known universities.

“Employers often tell me that they just want someone who wants to work and who doesn’t come in with a sense of entitlement,” Crapuchettes said.

For college graduates currently seeking a full-time position, Crapuchettes agrees that building a network is the most important step.

“They should get out and meet people, shake hands, and start building relationships,” he said.

This article was originally published on The Epoch Times.

The post 1 in 4 Unemployed Americans Has a Degree – The Future of White Collar Jobs appeared first on LewRockwell.

There are many ways in which investors steal from the public, but there also are ways in which they steal from each other — and Ponzi schemes are merely one example of that, but insider trading is another, and there are others as well. However, their biggest thefts, by far, are from the public, and most such thefts are entirely legal and will be described here, by presenting examples of them.

On 4 November 2025, Semafor, a loyal propaganda-organ for the U.S. empire, headlined “Exclusive / As Trump pressures Venezuela, investors see ‘major opportunities’”, and reported:

As President Donald Trump takes an increasingly aggressive approach toward regime change in Venezuela, international investment giants are already eyeing potential benefits that Nicolás Maduro’s ouster would create.

During last month’s IMF-World Bank meetings in Washington, Barclays organized a private meeting to talk investment opportunities with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, two sources familiar with the meeting told Semafor.

The meeting was widely attended by investment firms, hedge funds, and others interested in future business in Venezuela, said Rafael de la Cruz, the director of the US office of Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia, who is recognized by the US as the winner of the last Venezuelan election. The opposition leader’s team has also held “informal conversations” with the World Bank, IMF, and Inter-American Development Bank about Venezuela’s future, de la Cruz said.

“We have been in touch with several companies that are showing more and more interest in the possibility of opening up Venezuela for business,” he said in an interview.

In addition, UBS’s chief investment office put together an eight-page memo last month that focuses on “visualizing the day after tomorrow” in Venezuela. The research document highlighted the Trump administration’s “hawkish approach” towards Caracas and noted that “Venezuela’s transition away from Chavismo could unlock major opportunities,” in part because of its oil reserves and “severely underutilized economy.” …

Hawkish Republican lawmakers are cheering on the Trump administration’s efforts against Venezuela. …

“The nice thing is, they’ve got plenty of natural resources,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told Semafor, referring to post-Maduro investment opportunities in Venezuela. “In a democracy in Venezuela, their resources are massive, so there’ll be a lot of people who want to invest.” …

On 22 November 2024, I had headlined “How Corrupt America Is at the Top” and gave as an example the following from Wikipedia, about Rick Scott:

On March 19, 1997, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Health and Human Services served search warrants at Columbia/HCA facilities in El Paso and on dozens of doctors with suspected ties to the company.[41] Eight days after the initial raid, Scott signed his last SEC report as a hospital executive. Four months later, the board of directors pressured him to resign as chairman and CEO.[42] He was succeeded by Thomas F. Frist Jr.[43] Scott was paid $9.88 million in a settlement, and left owning 10 million shares of stock then worth more than $350 million.[44][45][46] The directors had been warned in the company’s annual public reports to stockholders that incentives Columbia/HCA offered doctors could run afoul of a federal anti-kickback law passed in order to limit or eliminate instances of conflicts of interest in Medicare and Medicaid.[43]

During Scott’s 2000 deposition, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times.[47] In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine in what was at the time the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history. Columbia/HCA admitted systematically overcharging the government by claiming marketing costs as reimbursable, by striking illegal deals with home care agencies, and by filing false data about use of hospital space. It also admitted to fraudulently billing Medicare and other health programs by inflating the seriousness of diagnoses and to giving doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the doctors referring patients to HCA. It filed false cost reports, fraudulently billed Medicare for home health care workers, and paid kickbacks in the sale of home health agencies and to doctors to refer patients. In addition, it gave doctors “loans” never intending to be repaid, free rent, free office furniture, and free drugs from hospital pharmacies.[48][8]

In late 2002, HCA agreed to pay the United States government $631 million, plus interest, and $17.5 million to state Medicaid agencies, in addition to $250 million paid up to that point to resolve outstanding Medicare expense claims.[49] In all, civil lawsuits cost HCA more than $2 billion to settle; at the time, this was the largest fraud settlement in U.S. history.[50][51]

That was an example of a mega-thief from U.S. taxpayers; so, obviously, he never went to prison for his mega-theft from the public, and he even became elected by the ones in Florida so as to be able to advocate now prominently for another foreign invasion by the U.S. regime in order to steal for U.S.-and-allied investors the world’s most petroleum-rich (and one of the world’s most gold-rich) country, so that the profits from extracting those natural resources will buy better yachts for U.S.-and-allied billionaires, not better education and health care for Venezuela’s people.

This is imperialistic fascism. (Political ‘scientists’, however, call America instead a “democracy.”) U.S.-and-allied billionaires want to do the same thing, steal the lands out from underneath, such nations as Russia, China, Iran, Palestine, etc.; but not only does this rob those peoples — it robs the American public too, because these psychopathic foreign adventures are being paid-for by them.

RELATED NEWS: On November 28th, the U.S.-and-allied proxy-war to grab Russia by placing in Ukraine the nearest border only 300 miles or 5 minute of missile-flying-time away from blitz-decapitating Russia’s central command in The Kremlin by an American nuclear missile, decisively failed, and so Trump ordered the current U.S. stooge leader of Ukraine, Zelensky, to accept Russia’s peace terms or else become militarily conquered by Russia. The U.S. military alliance to ultimately conquer Russia — NATO — has failed, and so NATO now faces its ultimate defeat, and clearly “the end of history” (the U.S. empire’s ultimately achieving control over the entire world) has now decisively turned out to have been a false expectation, and U.S.-and-allied investors are therefore now facing a future in which their net worths will be declining instead of (at everyone else’s expense) rising (as has especially been the case ever since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when that “end of histoory’ was supposed to have begun). Have you read or heard anything about any of this crucial history, in the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media or ‘history’-books? (Click on those last two links in order to learn more about it.)

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post How — and What — Investors Steal From the Public appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Happiness is the quiet truth that remains when illusion dissolves.”

There are conversations we must return to again and again, not because they are comfortable, but because they illuminate something essential about the human condition. Happiness is one of those conversations. And yet, in all our modern discussions about well-being, ambition, success, identity, and progress, we often overlook the foundation that held earlier generations together—the quiet structures of morality, ethics, community, and responsibility.

When I speak about happiness today, I often begin by reflecting on the world I grew up in. Not because nostalgia is a refuge, but because memory is a teacher. There was a time when the purpose of a person’s life was not to accumulate, not to ascend, not to display—but simply to live with decency, dignity, and integrity. You lived by the example of your father and grandfather, your mother and grandmother. Life was not about self-promotion; it was about belonging—to a family, a neighborhood, a community of values.

In the working towns of America, entire generations labored in the same factories and fields. In Parkersburg, West Virginia, where two of my uncles worked as engineers at the Shovel Factory, no one measured happiness by how much they owned. You needed enough to provide a quality of life, but you didn’t have to compete with your neighbors to feel worthy. You didn’t chase attention or cultivate a personal “brand.” You didn’t believe that love depended on performance.

We did simple things—cut grass in the summer, delivered newspapers at dawn, joined the Boy Scouts. These weren’t trivial activities; they were rites of passage that shaped character. People looked at you and said, “That’s a good boy,” or, “She’s a good girl,” and it meant something. It meant you carried yourself with integrity.

Life was quieter then, far less stressful, and people were taught not to envy others. Our parents had endured the Great Depression, survived the privations of World War II, and learned to be grateful for small things. Family held you together. Faith held you together. These weren’t abstractions—they were the pillars of a meaningful existence.

But something dramatic shifted over the last three decades. Not gradually, but radically. Today, quality of life has been replaced by standard of living. Meaning replaced by performance. Character replaced by identity. And the loss has been profound.

A new generation grew up believing that happiness required more—more education, more achievement, more status, more recognition. Parents worked themselves to exhaustion to ensure their children would “make it,” only to realize the cost: their children gained ambition but lost belonging. They inherited opportunity but not balance. They were raised to succeed, not to be whole.

I’ve seen families where the parents achieved everything—prestigious degrees, high salaries, social status—and yet the children were uprooted, lonely, or adrift. When you pour all your energy into climbing, something inevitably gets lost at the base. Today’s young adults often wake with no sense of purpose. They are anxious, easily overwhelmed, and spiritually unanchored—not because they are weak, but because the world they inherited is chaotic and rootless.

This generation—the so-called millennials—has been raised in a culture that praises independence but neglects interdependence. They grew up with entertainment instead of engagement, attention instead of affection, stimulation instead of structure. Many of them feel entitled, but that entitlement is often camouflage for something deeper: a loss of identity, a loss of direction, a loss of grounding.

I’ve met 38-year-olds living with their mothers—not out of compassion, but out of collapse. The mother sleeps on the couch; the son sleeps in the bedroom. There is no motivation. No drive. No sense of meaning. And yet all their comforts are met. That is the paradox: comfort without purpose leads to spiritual paralysis.

This is the most addicted generation in American history—not merely addicted to substances, but addicted to distraction, validation, stimulation, attention. Reality programs have replaced role models. Surgically enhanced influencers have replaced examples of dignity. Vulgarity and outrage have replaced civility.

And while individuals struggle in the private spaces of their lives, the culture itself fractures in the public sphere. Politicians weaponize identity, dividing people into tribes and pitting them against one another. The internet erases reputations with a click. Wikipedia becomes a tool of destruction. Social platforms reward cruelty, not compassion.

We are living not in a cultural disagreement, but in a primordial war—a war of values, meaning, identity, and existence. People walk around with a near-perpetual anger they don’t understand. Outrage has become a performance. Morality, a battleground.

Migration reshapes the country—not gently, not thoughtfully, but chaotically. Millions arrive who do not know the cultural glue that once held communities together. Assimilation, once common, is now contested. Entire nations—Sweden, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, and yes, the United States—experience tensions that no one is allowed to talk about without being labeled xenophobic or Islamophobic.

We have entered a time when merely questioning a narrative is treated as a moral crime. Disagree with Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and you are called anti-Semitic. Suggest a conversation about assimilation, and you are condemned. We have lost the ability to disagree with civility. We now argue like scorpions trapped in a cocktail glass—thrashing, venomous, frantic, unable to see the larger world.

We must address these realities, because they are not just political—they are psychological and spiritual. They shape our ability to find happiness. A society in perpetual conflict cannot cultivate inner peace. A culture at war with itself cannot nurture joy.

Identity politics, wokeism, Critical Race Theory—they didn’t appear in a vacuum. They came into a society already weakened, already confused, already drifting. And because the older generations did not speak up—did not guide, did not mentor, did not hold the line—young people were left to navigate moral complexity with only emotional intensity and ideological slogans.

A small minority—five percent of the population—now demands that the other ninety-five percent surrender their values, history, identity, and traditions. People lose their jobs for refusing to conform. Young white adults are taught to feel guilty for sins they never committed. Men are told they are inherently toxic. Women are told they are oppressed even when they have more freedom than any society has ever offered.

And then there is the irony—perhaps the greatest of all.

The same young generation that embraced advanced technology, that believed digital empowerment would liberate them, that celebrated artificial intelligence as progress— has now created the very system that threatens their future employment, dignity, and purpose.

They are building the machines that will replace them. And they do not see it.

We have engineered a society in which emotional reaction replaces reasoning, in which narratives replace facts, in which fragility replaces resilience. People wear their wounds like badges and condemn anyone who questions their stories. But healing cannot occur where questioning is forbidden. Growth cannot occur where discomfort is avoided.

This is the environment in which people are asked to find happiness.

How can they?

How can a young man who is told he is inherently toxic find pride in becoming a good father?

How can a young woman told she is a victim find empowerment in her accomplishments?

How can a citizen told their culture is worthless feel love for their country?

How can a person told they must surrender their values feel secure in who they are?

These are the questions that must be part of our conversation on happiness, because happiness does not exist in isolation from culture. It is shaped by meaning, identity, morality, purpose, and community.

And today, all of these have been shaken.

Yet, in the midst of this confusion, amid the noise and the ideological storms, one truth remains unchanged:

Happiness is still possible.

Happiness is still natural.

Happiness is still within reach.

But to find it, we must go deeper than politics, deeper than identity, deeper than technology. We must reclaim the inner compass that earlier generations took for granted. We must rediscover values that nourish the soul rather than inflame the ego. We must rebuild the inner architecture that makes life meaningful.

I’m here—not to criticize a generation, but to understand a civilization.

Not to lament the past, but to reawaken the future.

Not to condemn, but to remind us all—young and old—that happiness is not a luxury. It is a birthright.

And it is time we reclaimed it.

A Quiet Morning Question

Let me ask you a question—not the kind you answer quickly, but one you sit with, the way you might sit with a sunrise or a memory that still carries warmth.

Why aren’t you happy?

Not the superficial happiness of a good meal or a new purchase or a compliment someone tossed your way. I mean the happiness that settles into your bones, the kind that’s there when you wake in the morning and lingers like a quiet hum of gratitude.

When I look at people today—whether they’re in their twenties or their seventies—I see a common thread: a restlessness that never quite resolves, a sense that something is missing. Yet when I ask people what they think they lack, they almost always point outward. They tell me about the relationship they wish were different, the career they think they should have by now, the money they’re striving for, the body they want to reclaim, the recognition they believe they’ve earned.

But happiness is not an external acquisition. It is an internal condition.

And somewhere along the way, our culture forgot that.

I grew up in a time when happiness wasn’t complicated. People didn’t have much, and they didn’t need much. You lived by the example of your parents and grandparents, and you were expected to contribute—whether that meant mowing lawns in the summer, delivering papers at dawn, or joining the Boy Scouts so you could learn discipline, skill, and camaraderie. You knew your place in the world, not because someone forced you into it, but because you belonged to a community with shared values, shared hardships, and shared joys.

Back then, nobody talked about “branding” yourself or optimizing your potential or curating an identity for public consumption. Your worth wasn’t measured by how many likes you collected or how many credentials followed your name. A good person was simply a good person, and that was enough.

Today, the landscape is different. The problem isn’t just that people are stressed. It’s that they’re overwhelmed, overstimulated, and spiritually undernourished. They’re living at a pace designed to fracture attention and dilute meaning. They’re told from childhood that success must be earned through relentless striving, and that the proof of that success lies in possessions, status, and constant performance.

In the process, we’ve lost something essential: the inner stillness where happiness naturally grows.

The Life We Inherited vs. the Life We Created

There was a time when the measure of a good life was not how much you had, but how much you contributed—to your family, your community, your own moral compass. When I think back to the working-class towns of America, I think of people who lived simply but lived well. They had enough food on the table, enough time to share with their children, enough quiet evenings to reflect on what mattered.

Back then, quality of life meant something different. It meant a slower pace, a clearer conscience, a sense of gratitude for what you already had. You didn’t need dozens of distractions to numb yourself; you didn’t need a thousand channels or endless digital rabbit holes to escape into. You were taught to be content—not complacent, but content—with the blessings life offered.

But as the decades passed, America shifted. The culture began to equate happiness with standard of living rather than quality of life. The question silently changed from “Are you fulfilled?” to “Are you successful?”

And success, increasingly, meant more—more money, more credentials, more objects, more influence, more validation.

This shift didn’t happen overnight. It crept in slowly, the way weeds creep into a garden when you’re not paying attention. First, people stopped having time for hobbies. Then they stopped having time for friendships. Eventually they stopped having time for their own inner lives. They became so committed to “making it” that they forgot to live.

So, we built a society where exhaustion is a badge of honor and inner peace is treated like a luxury. A society where parents work themselves to the brink to give their children the best opportunities but offer little of their own presence. A society where children are raised to be achievers, not human beings.

And then one day, the same parents look at their grown children—brilliant, educated, ambitious—and wonder why they are anxious, entitled, or spiritually lost.

We created a generation that knows how to succeed but doesn’t know how to be. And now we’re paying the price.

The Great Generational Disconnect

Let’s talk honestly about the generational divide. Many of today’s young adults grew up in homes where their parents worked themselves ragged to build a better life—long hours, constant striving, unending pressure. These were parents who believed they were offering love through sacrifice. And in many ways, they were.

But the unintended consequence was a generation deprived of shared moments, quiet conversations, family rituals, and emotional modeling. Children learned to aim high, but they didn’t learn how to metabolize disappointment. They learned to chase accomplishments, but not how to cultivate character. They were taught to climb ladders, not how to sit still with themselves.

And when a person doesn’t know who they are, they go searching. They look to peers, influencers, algorithms, ideologies, and identities to tell them what matters. They become vulnerable to whatever voice is loudest, whatever message is trending, whatever belief offers a sense of belonging with the least amount of introspection.

Some drift into entitlement because nobody taught them gratitude.

Some drift into despair because nobody taught them resilience.

Some drift into outrage because nobody taught them humility.

And as these young people grew older, many entered adulthood lacking something previous generations took for granted: a sturdy inner life. The inner life that lets you say, “I am enough, even when I have little. I am enough, even when I fail. I am enough, even when the world is chaotic.”

Without that inner foundation, people look outward for meaning—and they grab whatever promises it fastest.

Some turn to substances.

Some turn to attention-seeking.

Some turn to ideologies that offer simple answers to complex realities.

Some turn to outrage because it feels like purpose.

Some turn to social validation because it feels like love.

But all these substitutes have something in common: they never fill the void.

A generation without roots cannot grow upward.

A generation without elders cannot mature.

A generation without inner stillness cannot find happiness.

The Tribalization of America

This is where we must step carefully, compassionately, but truthfully. Because part of the modern unhappiness epidemic emerges directly from the cultural fragmentation we are now living through.

We have become a society of tribes—each suspicious of the others, each convinced it holds the moral high ground. Critical Race Theory, the new expressions of woke culture, and identity politics were not born in a vacuum. They emerged from real historical wounds and genuine cries for justice. But in the hands of the inexperienced, the impatient, and the ideologically rigid, these movements mutated into something else entirely.

If you take a moment someday, go to my website and read some of my essays on these subjects—not to agree or disagree, but to understand the perspective I’m about to share. Because this is not an argument against justice. It is an argument against absolutism, dogma, and spiritual negligence.

How did we allow such immature and untested minds—young people still forming their worldview—to seize moral authority over the nation? Why did the elders, who possessed the wisdom of history remain silent as ideological storms uprooted the cultural soil we all once stood upon?

We became a balkanized society. Tribalized. Weaponized.

People started seeing each other less as individuals and more as categories—oppressor or oppressed, privileged or marginalized, good or evil. Nuance evaporated. Dialogue disappeared. Compassion was replaced with accusation. Confusion was mistaken for insight. Anger was mistaken for morality.

And underneath all of it was a profound unhappiness—disguised as activism, hidden beneath the armor of certainty, burning like an unexamined grievance.

How did we get here?

Because when mature voices retreat, immature voices fill the vacuum.

When wisdom is silent, ideology shouts.

When spirituality is neglected, tribalism becomes religion.

We handed a megaphone to a generation that had energy but not insight, passion but not perspective, grievance but not grounding. They took concepts meant for academic nuance and turned them into blunt weapons. They believed they were pursuing justice when in fact they were enforcing conformity. They believed they were dismantling oppression when they were often creating new forms of it—social, psychological, linguistic.

And while all this was happening, the wiser, older adults—those with enough life experience to guide, temper, or contextualize this movement—stayed silent. Maybe out of fear. Maybe out of social pressure. Maybe out of shame. Whatever the reason, the cost has been enormous.

In the chaos that followed, America lost something precious: a shared narrative of who we are.

Into that void stepped anger, victimhood, moral absolutism, and ideological purity tests. People became terrified of speaking honestly. Friendships fractured. Institutions caved under pressure. The culture split into warring camps, each certain the other was the enemy.

And now we find ourselves living in a soft, psychological version of Orwell’s 1984—where language is policed, history is rewritten, memory is manipulated, and dissent is punished. A society where fear replaces curiosity and conformity replaces courage.

How can anyone be happy in such an environment?

You cannot achieve inner harmony in a culture that thrives on division.

You cannot cultivate peace when you are constantly preparing for ideological battle.

You cannot feel whole when taught to define yourself by fragments.

But here is the deeper tragedy: beneath all this noise is a collective longing—a longing for fairness, belonging, purpose, and dignity. These movements grew from unmet emotional needs. But without wisdom to guide them, they morphed into engines of unhappiness.

And it will take wisdom—real wisdom, generational wisdom—to heal what has been broken.

The Age of Illusion

If you want to understand why so many people feel unmoored today, you have to recognize the scale and sophistication of the illusions surrounding us. We live inside an illusion-industrial complex—a coordinated ecosystem of marketing, media, entertainment, psychology, and now artificial intelligence—all designed to sell us a version of happiness that has nothing to do with the real thing.

Most people don’t realize they’ve been programmed since birth. They think they’re making free choices, setting independent goals, pursuing unique aspirations. But how free can those choices be when billions of dollars are spent every year studying how to manipulate your desires, trigger your fears, capture your attention, and monetize your insecurities?

Everywhere you look, you are nudged.

Everything you engage with has a motive behind it.

Every screen you touch has already studied you before you touched it.

Modern unhappiness is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a culture engineered to keep you dissatisfied—because dissatisfaction keeps you consuming. A happy person is a terrible customer; a centered person is an unresponsive target; a grounded person is immune to manipulation.

So the illusion makers must keep you chasing: a better body, a bigger home, a shinier identity, a more enviable life. They’re not selling products—they’re selling the promise of becoming a person who finally feels whole.

And people believe it. They pour their energy into acquiring symbols of success instead of cultivating the substance of well-being. They treat themselves as brands instead of as souls. They trade the inward journey for the outward performance.

But what happens when you wake up one morning and the illusion no longer satisfies?

What happens when you achieve everything you were told to pursue, and the emptiness is still there?

What happens when the applause stops and the silence feels unbearable?

This is the crisis of our time: a population that has achieved more outward comfort than any generation before it, and yet feels spiritually starved.

Illusions don’t just fail to nourish you—they drain you. They create a hunger that can never be satisfied, because the hunger itself was manufactured.

There is only one cure for illusion, and it isn’t more striving. The cure is truth—truth about who you are and who you are not.

But most people fear that truth. They fear the stillness that would reveal it. They fear the responsibility that comes with it. And so they stay in motion, hoping constant activity will distract them from the quiet, honest voice inside.

It never works.

The New AI Frontier: Promise and Loss

We cannot talk about modern illusion without addressing the most powerful illusion-generating machine humanity has ever created: artificial intelligence.

AI is extraordinary. It will revolutionize medicine, education, science, agriculture, communication, and every field we know. But it is also potentially devastating—psychologically, spiritually, and socially—if we don’t approach it with awareness.

Young people today must hear this clearly: Just because something is technologically advanced does not mean it is morally evolved.

AI does not possess wisdom, compassion, or conscience.

AI does not understand meaning or purpose.

AI does not love, and cannot teach you how to love.

It can predict your behavior, but it cannot guide your soul.

What troubles me most is how many bright young minds are shaping the future with no awareness of the consequences. They’re building systems so powerful that these systems will eventually replace them. Imagine someone so disconnected from reality that they cannot see they are building the machinery of their own obsolescence.

This is not science fiction—it is already happening.

Journalism, marketing, design, software development, legal research—entire professions are being restructured, automated, or erased by the very people who entered those professions just a decade ago.

And the irony is almost cruel: The generation that championed technology as liberation now finds itself trapped by it—competing with algorithms for relevance.

But the psychological cost may be even greater than the economic one.

AI saturates life with convenience, but convenience is poison when it replaces capability.

AI offers answers instantly, but wisdom cannot be downloaded.

AI mirrors your preferences, but spiritual growth requires confronting what you don’t prefer.

AI simulates connection, but connection without vulnerability is not human.

What happens to a culture when people outsource their thinking, their remembering, their decision-making, their creativity, their communication?

What happens to a generation whose emotional lives are shaped by algorithms that do not understand emotion?

You get people who know everything except themselves.

You get efficiency without meaning.

You get intelligence without wisdom.

You get progress without purpose.

And in that environment, happiness becomes elusive because happiness is a product of engagement, not automation. Happiness grows from the work of living—not from having life streamlined for you.

This is the paradox of AI: The more life becomes automated, the more the soul must become intentional.

Young people must reclaim what technology cannot give them: intuition, empathy, resilience, courage, purpose, and the ability to sit with discomfort long enough to grow from it.

AI may shape the future, but it cannot shape your humanity. Only you can do that.

Read the Whole Article

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Around the Napoleonic era, Prussian (German) general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book called “On War”. One of his most compelling arguments was the postulate that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means”. In essence, war is not some sudden, isolated event that just happens randomly, but rather an instrument of political goals that are pursued when diplomatic solutions are no longer viable or wanted by either side. Clausewitz’s argument emphasizes that war is fundamentally a deliberate political act with a carefully calculated purpose, rather than a purely emotional or violent undertaking. The latter two are merely used for mass manipulation that serves to convince the populace that the war is “just”.

Although written over two centuries ago, such a timeless argument perfectly encapsulates how warfare functions (and has functioned since the dawn of mankind). This is particularly true for the political West and its centuries-old aggression against the entire world. Since the dawn of the classical colonial era to the modern (or perhaps even postmodern) neocolonial system, the world’s most vile power pole has killed, maimed and enslaved billions of people at virtually every corner of this unfortunate planet. Entire native populations (particularly in the Americas and Australia) have either been wiped out entirely or brought to the point of extinction, robbing the world of their unique societies and civilizations.

It was from this brutal colonialism that countries like the British Empire and the United States emerged, bringing more misery, death and destruction to other “undiscovered” regions of the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, where genocidal Western policies continued with the same ferocity. Clausewitz’s point that warfare is a very deliberate act has been proven time and again, with one caveat being that the political West has become increasingly sophisticated at causing wars and making them seem like they’re unrelated to Western aggression against the world. Whenever any given opponent is too strong for a head-on engagement, the political West resorts to “low blows” and strategic sabotage in an attempt to gain the upper hand.

This has been particularly true for Russia and China, the two global superpowers that Western colonialists were always terrified of fighting directly. That’s precisely the reason unrest, revolutions and local wars were used against both, starting at least in the early 19th century and continuing to this day (Opium Wars, Crimean War, revolutions in Russia and China financed by Western capital, neocolonial wars and attempts to dismember both countries, etc). Although both Moscow and Beijing refused to give up and kept fighting, the damage done to their societies is virtually impossible to quantify. China lost well over a century from the early 19th to the late 20th century and is yet to fully regain its rightful place in the global arena.

Russia also lost more than a century after its victory in WWI was stolen, pushing it into at least half a decade of civil war, followed by WWII not even 20 years later. The guns were still hot in Europe and the Pacific when the US and the crumbling British Empire conceived “Operation Unthinkable” and dozens of similar plans that involved dropping at least 300 nuclear bombs on Moscow alone. Russia uncovered the plot and pre-empted it by developing its own atomic weapons, forever stifling Western wet dreams about “imposing the will of Anglo-Americans” on the Kremlin through the use of nuclear hellfire. However, these monstrous plans were never really dropped, but merely postponed and left for “better times”.

The political West seems to think those times have come and that the Eurasian giant is greatly weakened due to the unfortunate dismantling of the Soviet Union. NATO’s crawling “Barbarossa 2.0” is strategically almost identical to the original launched by its geopolitical (and literal) Nazi predecessor, albeit conducted through far more sinister and truly Machiavellian policies. However, the endgame is precisely how Clausewitz described it – the continuation of the same policies by different means. Still, while the political West’s cold-blooded calculus is meticulously executed, it’s also fundamentally dominated by one of the most dangerous delusions in human history – that Russia can be defeated.

Namely, Italian Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, just told Financial Times that NATO is considering “more proactive measures in response to Russia’s escalating hybrid warfare”. He cited an alleged “rise in Russian-backed cyberattacks, sabotage operations and airspace violations over Europe – which NATO could mirror and more, as any potential ‘pre-emptive strike’ on Russian targets would be justified”. In order to justify this “pre-emptive strike”, Admiral Dragone insisted that such an attack could “under certain circumstances and context be classified as a defensive action”. He also added a laughable claim that this would be “further away from our normal way of thinking and behavior”.

The very idea that unadulterated, bloodthirsty belligerence is somehow “out of the ordinary” for the most murderous racketeering cartel in human history makes any normal human being lose their breath and convulse due to excessive laughter. Namely, for anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past three to four decades, how many NATO wars can you count off the top of your head alone? Without even considering previous wars and starting only with the post-Cold War era and the direct aggression on Iraq (twice), Serbia/Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, now Venezuela, etc, there have been dozens of official invasions and unofficial NATO-orchestrated “civil” wars that resulted in millions of civilian deaths.

Obviously, not a single NATO official or military officer was ever held accountable for the sea of blood left in their wake. All they ever talk about are “mistakes”, but no “international criminal court” has ever found these admissions peculiar enough to warrant the attention of “international law and justice”. Quite the contrary, the political West (ab)used the so-called “rules-based world order” to the maximum in order to justify NATO’s destruction of the said countries and even presented all of it as some sort of a “noble humanitarian mission”. The world’s most aggressive racketeering cartel is now dead set on pushing the narrative that yet another “just cause” is there, only this time once again against Russia (for God knows which time in the last 800 years).

Moscow’s “evil oppression of poor little NATO” is the ultimate bait for Western audiences in what Washington DC, London and Brussels apparently see as their “last chance to defeat Russia”. Obviously, they never listened to the advice of their late Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, whose rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, was: “Do not march on Moscow.” It’s extremely difficult to imagine that people like Admiral Dragone never heard of this advice (effectively a command). However, it seems their arrogance makes them think they know better than one of the people who fought an actual war and defeated Nazi armies in North Africa and Western Europe. He knew full well that those forces were still only a fraction of German power, which was heavily focused on Russia.

The post How Should Russia React to NATO’s ‘Preemptive Strikes’ Threat? appeared first on LewRockwell.

This talk was given on December 2nd, 2025 for Massachusetts Peace Action (MAPA) The video with discussion is here:

Setting the Stage in Ukraine

Ukrainian independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 hinged on the re-collection and dismantlement of 1,700 Soviet-owned and operated nuclear weapons, under the auspices of the Non Proliferation Treaty in 1994. As a soviet state, Ukraine had been the 3rd largest nuclear power in the world. The relocation and destruction of these Russian nuclear weapons was associated with guarantees to Ukraine, according to Wikipedia, as follows:

In 1994, Ukraine agreed to transfer these weapons to Russia for dismantlement and became a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in exchange for economic compensation and assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders. Almost twenty years later, Russia, one of the parties to the agreement, invaded Ukraine in 2014.

I want to take a moment to emphasize the assurance that was agreed to by the US, the UK and Russia: “To respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty within its existing borders.”

Like the United States, a modern Ukraine faced a civil war, reaching a crisis point in 2014, with the Crimea’s secession to/annexation by Russia and the larger land war between the urbanized Ukrainian west and the rural, resource rich and ethnically Russian Donbass region. Incidentally, Crimea had been originally transferred to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, in a move that ensured his rise to Chairman of the CCCP later that year.

The Minsk Protocol in late 2014, and Minsk Agreements in early 2015 between Russia and Ukraine, put together after Russia annexed Crimea, related to the same parts of Ukraine we are talking about today almost a dozen years later– the culturally and religiously Russian areas in Crimea and the Donbass. The Kiev nationalist leadership, including the recently elevated second most powerful man in Kiev, Rustem Umerov, has long held a vision of the repossession of Crimea, and subjugation of the Donbass region.

But back to 1994. Wikipedia, which has evolved as a friendly CIA psyop, admits that three countries promised to respect Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in 1994 – but states that only Russia violated this promise. The US and the UK history of rabid Russophobia, our neoconservative State Department, and corrupt Congressional interference in Ukrainian elections in the years leading up to 2014 are today common knowledge. Vicky Nuland’s “Yats is our man” selection of the anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk, brought to power by the US in the Maidan Coup, precipitated both the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the rise of US-allied Volodomyr Zelensky five years later, elected in a landslide after years of conflict on a platform of “peace.”

This interference is part and parcel of the US violation of a widely known pledge by several US administrations to the newly independent Russian Federation that NATO would not move one inch eastward. Yet, beginning with Bill Clinton’s presidency and continuing unabated since then, NATO sought to expand eastward, in war and preparation for war, to groom a number of former Soviet states for NATO accession.

My point here is not to ridicule Wikipedia’s bias and the mainstream narrative on Ukraine, but to explain clearly that the US has been and remains a major violator of its past agreements. It has encouraged and funded NATO expansion, and thus, nuclear expansion, closer and closer to Russia’s borders, in spite the fact the USSR was peacefully retrenched as a smaller, non-communist Federated Republic. Instead of “taking the win” in 1991, the US and NATO continued the Cold War. Most analysts admit that this tendency is because our foreign policy is derived, designed, and implemented autonomously by the multi-trillion dollar military industrial complex. This is the nightmare scenario that Eisenhower warned of in 1961, and it is the clear and sane observation of Major General Smedley Butler a century ago, in his angry pamphlet “War is a Racket.”

How important is it to end the current war in Ukraine?

Ukrainians deserves peace, but not on the terms demanded by Europe and Kiev, mainly because those terms are guarantors of more war, more NATO expansion eastward, and a greater likelihood of a nuclear accident or even a global nuclear war. An overt and agreed-upon vision of peaceful neutrality was the foundation of Ukrainian independence in the early 1990s, and it remains the only vision that will support longterm peace. We can talk about the 28 point or the 19 point outlines created by Washington oligarchs, themselves seeking financial advantage and continued influence, including military sales and services, in a smaller but intact and US-allied Ukraine. We can talk about European military expansionist goals, seeking leverage over Ukraine, for resources, energy flows, weapons and as a territory to allow for unconstrained NATO training and deployment, as western Europe no longer supports this for popular and environmental reasons. We can even talk about Polish and German nationalistic interests in Ukraine as a rump state, or a remnant state, as a past – and maybe future – territory variously controlled or occupied by Poland and Germany.

Extreme nationalist political ideology, tainted by Nazi symbology and shaped by Nazi values, remains strong in Ukraine. Nearly four years of a meatgrinder of a war has sharpened this ideology, and made it even more desperate. Ukrainian supremacist ideology and contempt for Russia in particular has also been successfully cultivated throughout the West, much of it using tax dollars and pushed by corporate war pigs for fun and profit. This narrative goes back long before 2014, and continues today despite its negative impact on average Ukrainians, despite the near destruction of Ukraine’s future generations and economy.

Ukraine has become – like her east European sisters who joined NATO after 1991 – a permanent graveyard for a massive number of legacy weapons systems held by Europe and the West, as well as a testing ground for a wide variety of newer and future weapons. Since the onset of war in 2022, Ukraine has been the burial round for legacy and outdated systems, and a testing ground for new systems and tactics, for both the West and to a lesser extent for Russia and her allies. What is far more obvious and evident is that Ukraine has been a victim of US/NATO strategies to create fresh Western controlled markets and new, if artificial, demand for Western weapons.

Without US and Western urging for decades, Ukraine would likely have remained neutral and unaligned, a profitable and eventually prosperous trading intersection between East and West. The civil war in the Donbass would not have occurred without US and NATO, especially British, interference in Kiev politics and national elections. Autonomous regions within Ukraine, including Crimea, might have had no reason to fight Kiev for autonomy, and should have provided no reason for Kiev to bomb and attack those regions as secessionist – but for Western interference and promises of massive amounts of military aid and cash for any challenge to Russia. The West started the war in Ukraine (and actively refused at every opportunity to allow Ukraine to end it) and US/NATO rationale was, in my opinion, threefold:

1) to create one more proxy war (this time in Ukraine) to weaken Russia, much as the 2019 Rand Study “Extending Russia: Competing From Advantageous Ground” explained;

1a) to allow for a seamless shift of forward deployed US and NATO war resources from Afghanistan (which ended in 2021 with little to show but a restored opium trade, US embarrassment, and trillions of dollars wasted);

2) as mentioned above, to allow for elimination of legacy Euro and US military systems in order to create new markets and incentive to juice the military industrial sectors on both sides of the Atlantic, and;

3) a US-led initiative, apparently supported by German politicians and others, to permanently break the flow Russian energy into Europe, and replace that market with far more expensive US energy, more tightly binding Europe to a western energy and financial orbit. Increasing the global price of oil generally, while reducing it for Russian energy exports through sanctions regimes, also served the petrodollar aspect of the western financial system. While Russia survived and even thrived under these regimes, becoming more integrated with its global partners, the price of oil has been and remains pimped by US wars, as it has for decades in service to dollar reserve dominance.

The Ukraine war has revealed to the world exactly how desperate the US-European entity is to remain dominant in a world of increasing multipolar prosperity and economic independence. What we see is the ending of empire; we are witnessing the very predictable acts of an empire not ready to recede or relinquish power in the new world that is pressing upon it. The fact that the neocolonial racist state of Israel is deeply embedded in this sphere of militarism, war and control of markets and populations – to the detriment of those markets and populations – is not an accident. It is all part of the same state, and Ukraine is another face of this state at its ever-expanding boundary.

Clearly, it is important to end the war in Ukraine. But it is even more important is to understand how a civil conflict inside Ukraine became attractive to the US and NATO, and how it was massaged, fueled, and leveraged into usefulness to the western alliance. It may be even more important to understand why the United States, as a nuclear power and world leader in the machinery and productions of war, seeks opportunities to spark battles abroad. It is of critical importance to study what the United States and NATO do – and plan to do – in the event of predictable failure of these sparks, conflicts, and full-blown NATO proxy wars against Russia, or another near-peer nuclear power, like China.

Could, and will, Ukraine – or a similar proxy war in the future – lead to nuclear armageddon?

When nuclear armed empires seek a fight, economically or militarily, directly or indirectly, the world should tremble. Tucker Carlson recently interviewed a nuclear scientist named Ivana Hughes; their conversation is a terrifying reminder not only of the impacts and possibilities of a nuclear explosion, accident or war, but of actual past nuclear close calls, the nature of our collapsing nuclear control and inspection treaties, proliferation and miniaturization of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons strategy and nuclear weapons or material in the hands of both state and non-state actors. Dr Hughes explains both technical and political facets of nuclear weapons, and she quotes the late Dan Ellsberg, one of our most well-known whistleblowers from his 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” Ellsworth wrote “nuclear weapons policies, past and current, are dizzyingly insane and immoral.” Reviewers called his book a “chronicle of madness” and Ellsberg agreed.

Dan Ellsberg and Hughes, along with billions of people on earth share the view that nuclear weapons should be eliminated entirely. The nine governments in the world with nuclear weapons disagree with the rest of the world, and their actions, in particular the aggressive and provocative actions of several of these nuclear states, are incentivizing non-nuclear states to gain access to a nuclear weapon. And yet, as we saw in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, agreements can be made to remove a nuclear weapon capability, and as Russia did, dismantle and destroy them. Past treaties have reduced the numbers of nuclear weapons and warheads, and the nonproliferation treaty has been somewhat effective, although one US allied nuclear country refuses to even participate in that mild agreement. In the case of South Africa, this same country, Israel, in 1975, offered to sell nuclear weapons “in three sizes” to the apartheid regime; Botha did not pursue the offer for long, mainly due to cost, and later South Africa developed their own nuclear weapons capability, with Israeli assistance. However, when apartheid ended, this nuclear program was safely abandoned. More recently, this past summer, we recall that after the Israeli and American attacks on Iran in the so-called 12 day war, Pakistan effectively made public the concept that Iran would not need to develop its own nuclear weapons as Pakistan would serve as their nuclear proxy.

Nuclear policy and war strategies continue to evolve, both for state and non-state actors. The sheer numbers of nuclear weapons presumably poised and assigned targets around the world is literal insanity, and yet we find the West uninterested in restraint or treaties that provide for transparency and inspection, and we also find that, as it might be expected, nuclear capable militaries have written and rarely debated strategies for the conduct of nuclear wars, specifically survivable, and “winnable” nuclear exchanges. I refer again to the Rand Corporation for examples of this on the US and western side, but no doubt this kind of strategizing the unthinkable is part and parcel for all of the nine nuclear capable nations. Israel, for example, has in place a well-known strategy called “The Sampson Option” whereby prepositioned or deliverable nuclear weapons, in the land of enemy and ally alike, will be detonated if Israel is existentially threatened. Because the definition of existential threats and existential risks are largely determined by sociopathic, incompetent, and/or compromised politicians, in a time of the most dire and urgent stress, this kind of dead man’s switch for nuclear detonation should be of grave concern. I use the example of Israel here, in part because it is notorious, and in part because it may not be as rare and unusual as it is currently portrayed in the media. Why couldn’t or wouldn’t any country with nuclear weapons see fit to place them in a location where a detonation of a nuclear weapon could initiate a chain reaction – somewhere other than their own country – that would cause a global financial reset, the elimination of enemies or competitors, or even just to set off a massive conventional global war that would justify state totalitarianism and state barbarism exponentially worse than that of the 20th century?

The Sampson Option, like the older idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, elegantly serves as leverage prior to its execution. But it also brings nuclear game theory to a whole new level. Many politicians and strategists today believe that a nuclear conflict could be initiated, then contained, constrained, and stopped before a planetary catastrophe. In other words, many politicians and their advisors believe a nuclear war can be “won.”

What does this have to do with the proxy war in Ukraine? Anyone who has been following the back and forth of diplomatic and political language between Trump and Putin, accompanied by self-righteous squeals of the NATO hyenas, or even the poetically vicious commentary by former Russian President Medvedev over the course of this war has a good understanding that nuclear threats – of unstoppable intercontinental Oreshnik missiles or secret nuclear submarines lurking just off everyone’s shorelines – are real. One wrong step, one mistake in judgement, one accident or one false flag conducted by either state or non-state actors, could be catastrophic, even world-ending.

It is important to remember, of the many nuclear accidents that have occurred since the 1950s, the purposeful detonation of a nuclear weapon at an enemy has thus far been prevented by the acts and judgement of human beings, most of whom were not were not politicians nor sitting at the top of the decision pyramid. In other words, moral and based human actors prevented the destruction of the planet – often in opposition to what their political leadership ordered or demanded. The Cuban missile crisis, as resolved by JFK and Khrushchev directly, in 1963, was a triumph of morality and a legitimate human fear of a new kind of hell on earth, superseding the advice of the ambitious, the arrogant, and the stupid on both sides. Curiously, we may have been blessed by Khrushchev’s machinations regarding Crimea, as it provided JFK the right partner in 1963 to prevent imminent nuclear war.

We are ruled today by the ambitious, the arrogant, and the stupid, most obviously in the West, and there are many sides intervening and interfering, many facets of nuclear capability, including small nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, neutron bombs, far exceeding the variety the Israelis offered to South Africa in 1975, bombs in three sizes. The evolution of nuclear weapons is leading the nuclear armed world to contemplate and suggest their use, to threaten their use against an “enemy,” to grossly and reflexively describe the nature of global competition as a military battleground, where nuclear weapons are part of the arsenal.

Any place on earth where nuclear powers confront each other there is a risk of miscommunication, accident, and more than one immoral and desperate politician. When the confrontation is taking place far from one or both homelands, the risk perception is no longer mirrored, but unbalanced. Thus, the West is fine with risking nuclear conflict in eastern Europe, and fighting to the last Ukrainian. Thus, the United States recently altered its “no first strike” policy, followed naturally by Russia, as Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD is replaced by a more dangerous “dead man’s switch” variant, and a new kind of planning for the survival of a nuclear exchange, one that includes something that looks like “winning,” but only to the ambitious, the arrogant and the stupid.

But as with other proxy wars, in Ukraine, we have seen only superficial attempts by the Trump administration to end this war, because it continues much as the Biden administration and enables, authorizes, coordinates, funds and cheers it. The 28 point “plan” – a weak set of concepts to begin with – suffers modification after modification as it travels from from ally to enemy, to the host of the proxy war, and the NATO beneficiaries and supporters of the total sacrifice of Ukraine, and back to the Janus-like Peacemaker-slash-War Enabler. The war game has many players, the risk assessment is supremely complicated and variable, the costs of peace and war always financialized, never humanized.

For the US-NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, we have at least four main players. A multi-pack of politically precarious and bankrupt European prime ministers and presidents, a poorly advised and ill-tempered American President in his final term, a slow-to-anger Russian president pushed to anger and the recognition of an existential threat from the West, and the crumbling Ukrainian house of cards inhabited by an enraged ideological cadre unwilling to accept the irreversible losses inflicted upon it by enemy and ally alike. For clarity, I have left out the elite oligarchs at play here, and the complex machinations of the military industrial complexes that have interests that may or may not align with those of the political leaders. For the sake of time, I have also left out the list of state and non-state actors that could seek to exploit this European battlefield by extending or expanding the war, and this could be done through the use of a creatively, or clumsily designed nuclear event. No doubt the intense opportunistic and terroristic bombardment of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Facility by the Ukrainian military in the first several years of the war, with US and NATO support, lend credence to this suggestion.

In conclusion, I am one of many dissenters and defense whistleblowers, I have a well-earned lack of faith in any state, or any state’s political leadership, and I have witnessed personally the ineptness of both the US and NATO military conduct and decision-making. I have noticed that most western militaries and their politicians do not lead from the front, but rather huddle with their favorite soothsayers safely in the rear, relying on 1s and 0s, dollars and cents, to inform them instead of history, reality, ethics, and their own citizen’s fervent desire for peace now, and peace for their children and grandchildren.

The war in Ukraine should never have started, and it did so because of the political games engaged in by Ukrainian oligarchs, American oligarchs, and European oligarchs, both elected and unelected. The gamble was poorly thought out, and when it went south, the gamblers doubled down, collapsing the Ukrainian Army, halving the population of Ukraine in four years via secession, military losses, emigration, and the grave.

The criminal war in Ukraine should be concluded. I recently discovered that the 2014 Maidan “revolution” is referred to by many Ukrainian nationalists as the “revolution of dignity.” It surprised me, because I understood the Euromaidan from the point of view of Vickie Nuland and John McCain, as a successful example of a CIA-backed color revolution, a political coup directed live from Washington, one of several the US government has attempted on Russia’s western border. Today, in the aftermath of a $100 million corruption scandal that has implicated Zelensky’s sponsors and his chief peace negotiator, we hear Zelensky repeatedly use the word “dignity” in his public statements, this time in terms of a peace with dignity for Ukraine. If there can be dignity, the US and NATO are incapable of affording it. Nonetheless, if words like dignity help get us there, they should be welcomed.

The fundamental problem is that our ability to kill each other, and destroy our world – at least the ability of nine nations on the planet to do this using their expansive menu of nuclear weapons – has advanced, while the morality and discipline of our political leadership has contracted or collapsed. Our leaders have become incapable of learning, and perceive their political survival as more important than humanity’s survival. Any conflict between nuclear powers risks global disaster – but creating unjust wars, creating enraged and desperate losers of those wars, makes finding any peace more complex, more daunting, and less satisfactory. It also increases the opportunity for state and non-state gaming of a nuclear detonation, a nuclear gamble, a nuclear “accident” in an amoral attempt to run the table, shift momentum, or create a new balance of power.

I didn’t talk about the details of how war might be concluded in Ukraine, or how we can truly slow the rush of the Doomsday clock to midnight. But I hope I have made clear the depth and complexity of this debate, so that as Americans, we might better understand that our own power exercised at home in our own society, culture, and government, is both courageous, and time well spent.

This article was originally published on Without Reservation or Purpose of Evasion and was reprinted with the author’s permission. 

The post Ukraine War: Negotiate, Don’t Escalate and Risk WWIII appeared first on LewRockwell.

Last week, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote about “a startling document” that the CIA has kept hidden for some 50 years. The document apparently said that “the Mexican government had investigated Kennedy’s assassination and concluded Cuba was responsible.”

It’s just more misdirection on the part of the CIA. Its targeted audience is those Americans who cannot bring themselves to recognize that the Pentagon and the CIA orchestrated and carried out the assassination of a U.S. president. The misdirection serves to confuse and confound that segment of American society.

Oh, sure, that segment of Americans can accept that the U.S. national-security establishment does wield the power to assassinate people. They can also accept that the Pentagon and the CIA have, in fact, exercised this power by assassinating people. What they cannot accept is that this dark-side governmental apparatus with the power of assassination took out a U.S. president whose polices were considered to constitute a grave threat to “national security,” which has been the most important term in the American political lexicon ever since the U.S. government was converted to a national-security state in the 1940s.

We know, for a fact, that there is no way that Cuba and its communist leader Fidel Castro assassinated JFK. How do we know that? Two ways:

1. The JFK autopsy. There is one undisputed aspect of the JFK assassination: It was the U.S. military establishment that conducted the fraudulent autopsy on JFK’s body.

Not Cuba. Not the Soviet Union. Not Israel. Not the Mafia. Only one entity conducted the fraudulent autopsy: The U.S. military establishment.

That’s how we know that the U.S. national-security establishment orchestrated and carried out the assassination itself. There is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None! Once fraud is established, it is case closed on the assassination itself.

That’s because there can be only one reason for a fraudulent autopsy that took place just a few hours after the assassination. That reason has to be a cover-up in the assassination itself. What other reason could there be for a fraudulent autopsy on the body of a U.S. president that was conducted shortly after the assassination itself?

I have set forth much of the fraud in my book The Kennedy Autopsy, which is a synopsis of Douglas Horne’s watershed 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. In my opinion, anyone who reads these two books with an open mind cannot help but conclude that this was a fraudulent autopsy.

For example, there were two separate brain examinations, the second of which involved a brain that could not have belonged to Kennedy. That’s the brain examination that became part of the official autopsy. How can that not be considered evidence of fraud?

Or consider the fact that there were three casket entries into the Bethesda morgue, two of which were secret and surreptitious. How can that not be considered evidence of fraud?

2. At the time he was assassinated, JFK was reaching out to the Soviet Union and communist Cuba in an effort to bring an end to the Cold War and an end to the mindset of perpetual anti-Russia and anti-Cuba hostility that had been inculcated in the American people.

That’s what his Peace Speech at American University was all about. He delivered it just four months before they took him out. In fact, that speech was essentially a declaration of war by JFK against the U.S. national-security establishment and its dark-side vision for the future direction of America. See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.

In fact, at the very moment he was assassinated, Kennedy had an emissary having lunch with Castro in an effort to normalize relations with Cuba. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, why would Castro be interested in assassinating a U.S. president who was bucking the Pentagon and the CIA by doing his best to restore normal relations with Cuba and Russia? At the risk of further belaboring the obvious, how could the Pentagon and the CIA permit such a president to remain in office, given that his policy of establishing peaceful and friendly relations with Russia and Cuba, they were convinced, posed a grave threat to U.S. “national security”?

My hunch is that the vast majority of Americans “know” that the official lone-nut theory of the JFK assassination is ridiculous. But many people within that majority still do not want to “know know” the truth. The truth still frightens them. It’s that segment of American society that the CIA continues to target with its various assassination theories, like the “Cuba did it” theory, in an effort to confuse and confound them.

For Americans who decide that they want to “know know” the truth about the JFK assassination, all they have to do is study the fraudulent autopsy that was conducted on JFK’s body. Once a critical mass of Americans come to the realization that the JFK autopsy was fraudulent, Americans will come to the firm realization as to why it is so critically important to their freedom, peace, and well-being to restore America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic to our land.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Castro Didn’t Participate in the JFK Autopsy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Michael Malice (“YOUR WELCOME”) welcomes political commentator and prominent civil rights lawyer, Robert Barnes, onto the show to discuss the egregious secrets of John Bolton’s classified leaks, the internet’s role in exposing deep state lies, and how a certain science fiction novel from 1973 might have given us a clue on the future crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.

Robert Barnes on the Deep Background of the Deep State Up to the JFK Assassination and Beyond

Not only is Robert Barnes a master litigator and top-notch attorney but one of the most in depth, articulate, well read and street-smart experienced political analysts in the nation. Whether it involves the institutionalized criminal machine cartels of the Democrats and Republicans or the deep state, he is a true polymath reminiscent of Murray N. Rothbard in his power elite analysis of Realpolitik and geopolitics,

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David Krall wrote:

This proves we dodged a bullet.

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Thanks, John Smith.

Media ITE

 

The post Hillary Clinton Says Young Americans Are Pro-Palestine Because They Watch ‘Totally Made Up’ Videos of Gaza Horrors appeared first on LewRockwell.

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No, not sketchy Milei. The Prince of Liechtenstein.
He put Hans Hoppe’s libertarian ideas into practice rather than calling their author juvenile names as Milei has done.

The post A Real Libertarian Hero appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Bill Madden:

Those attempting to persuade our military personnel not to follow illegal orders via national advertising will probably be found not guilty.  Those arguing against this persuasive effort usually don’t use the word “illegal” when condemning the six former government employees and might be found guilty of using excessive rhetorical B.S. in the court of public opinion. 

Refusing illegal orders in the military is difficult to do because they normally are generated high in the chain of command and very few officers in the chain really know what is or is not a legal order.  Immediate superiors can be very demanding and the orders are usually given in high pressure environments.  Refusing an illegal military order is tantamount to whistleblowing and, as much good as it does for the concept of truth, the whistleblower’s life is made miserable as a punishment for his honesty and a warning to others.

Please remember that Congressman Massie is on the president’s black list for his adherence to the Constitution.  MTG is on Trump’s black list for attempting to enforce his campaign promises. 

We have an even more important case of illegal government activity unfolding now with President Trump ordering the destruction of suspected drug running boats near Venezuela and also his threat to invade Venezuela without a declaration of war.  If his activity is judged illegal, everyone from Trump to the enlisted man pushing to missile launch button will be guilty.  But, of course, nothing will probably be done to hold anyone accountable as usual.  If some token legal action is taken against Trump and the military, the only ones punished will be the lowest ranked officer and, maybe, his superior – like with Lt. Calley and the My Lai Massacre.  We are a rogue nation being led by a choice of evils and his cabinet of neocon warmongers.

 

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Click here:

Eugyppius

 

The post Thousands of leftist protesters clash with thousands of police in a massive action to defend “Our Democracy” against a few hundred AfD members appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ricordo a tutti i lettori che su Amazon potete acquistare il mio nuovo libro, “La rivoluzione di Satoshi”: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0FYH656JK 

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

____________________________________________________________________________________

di Thomas Kolbe

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-bce-si-prepara-alla-prossima-crisi)

Tredici anni fa Mario Draghi, allora Presidente della Banca Centrale Europea, aprì le porte alla liquidità per impedire il collasso dell'Eurozona. Da allora i problemi strutturali sono rimasti irrisolti. Ora ci troviamo di fronte al prossimo capitolo della crisi del debito, che è stata solo in parte risolta. È tempo che la BCE prepari il suo kit di strumenti di emergenza.

Da qualche tempo sui mercati finanziari mondiali si sta delineando un trend preoccupante: i titoli di stato a lungo termine stanno subendo pressioni di vendita, persino quelli di economie leader come Stati Uniti, Giappone, Regno Unito e, in misura significativa, Francia. Di conseguenza i rendimenti stanno aumentando, insieme ai costi di rifinanziamento per nazioni già fortemente indebitate.

Architettura finanziaria gravemente danneggiata

È il cosiddetto segmento lungo della curva dei rendimenti ad allarmare sia i policymaker che le banche centrali. La stabilità dell'architettura finanziaria globale si basa sui titoli obbligazionari a lungo termine di Stati Uniti, Giappone ed Eurozona. Banche, fondi pensione sovrani e sistemi assicurativi hanno già pagato un pesante tributo a causa delle vendite in questo segmento. La struttura è stata gravemente indebolita e l'Europa si trova ora ad affrontare la prossima crisi del debito.

È una cosa che non si può più ignorare: i titoli di stato a lungo termine, un tempo considerati sicuri e con rendimenti reali positivi, hanno perso una notevole fiducia. Uno sguardo alle turbolenze politiche della Francia e al declino del Regno Unito sottolinea che uscire dalla spirale del debito – con deficit annuali in continua crescita e sistemi sociali al collasso in una società europea che invecchia e soffre di migrazioni – sembra altamente irrealistico.

La conseguenza: chiunque non sia obbligato a detenere questi titoli li scarica, rifugiandosi nei cosiddetti porti sicuri, come metalli preziosi o contanti, spesso in dollari o franchi svizzeri; uno schema collaudato quando i tempi si fanno duri.

L'Europa nel mirino

Mentre il rendimento dei decennali britannici è salito oltre il 5,7% – il livello più alto dal 2009 – la crisi in Francia si sta intensificando drasticamente. Il Paese è nel caos politico e la società è frammentata e colpita dall'immigrazione, cosa che rischia di sfociare in violenti scontri di piazza nelle Banlieue.

La Francia è diventata da tempo uno stato ingovernabile e ora rischia di essere il punto di partenza della prossima crisi del debito nell'Eurozona.

Nuvole nere si addensano sull'Europa e la Germania non sarà risparmiata. Un tempo elogiata per la sua politica fiscale conservatrice, il Paese ha aperto la porta a gravi perturbazioni nei mercati con un programma di debito da mille miliardi di euro. Se la Germania sacrificasse la propria affidabilità creditizia solo per guadagnare tempo e avere una soluzione temporanea alla crisi del suo sistema sociale, trascinerebbe i suoi partner dell'UE nel baratro. Dall'inizio dell'unione monetaria i mercati hanno collegato l'affidabilità creditizia della comunità a quella della Germania.

Nessuna delle crisi europee – né l'eccessiva regolamentazione, né la crisi energetica, né il caos migratorio – è mai stata risolta e il continente è ora esposto alla prossima.

BCE in azione

La prossima crisi del debito seguirà probabilmente lo schema della precedente, avvenuta 15 anni fa: il contagio si diffonderà da un Paese all'altro, ognuno messo alla prova da ondate di vendite obbligazionarie a fronte di stabilità e resilienza. Ciò che potrebbe avere origine in Francia raggiungerà prima o poi la Germania attraverso gli stati dell'Europa meridionale fortemente indebitati. La domanda è: la BCE riuscirà a stabilizzare la situazione, come fece allora con il suo kit di emergenza?

Ogni crisi del debito sovrano è anche una crisi bancaria. Una quota significativa dei titoli di stato è detenuta nei bilanci delle banche commerciali e un brusco calo del loro valore di mercato rischia di provocare un pericoloso sovraindebitamento nel settore finanziario. Per mitigare questo fenomeno la BCE ha sviluppato un arsenale di misure di liquidità e stabilizzazione che costituiscono il cuore del suo kit di strumenti di emergenza. Tra queste figurano le operazioni di rifinanziamento a lungo termine (LTRO) e le operazioni di rifinanziamento mirate a lungo termine (TLTRO), le quali forniscono alle banche prestiti a lungo termine a basso tasso di interesse per garantire liquidità e mantenere il flusso di credito a imprese e famiglie.

Credito fiat sottoposto a una leva molto alta

Esiste anche l'Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA), una sorta di valvola di sicurezza per le istituzioni sottoposte a forti pressioni, solitamente garantita da titoli di stato o altri cosiddetti “asset di alta qualità”. Il kit di strumenti è completato da indicazioni prospettiche e politiche sui tassi di interesse, volte a orientare le aspettative e stabilizzare i mercati dei tassi di interesse, spesso più a livello psicologico che materiale.

Qui risiede un difetto centrale e un'incoerenza logica nelle banche centrali: proprio gli asset considerati “di alta qualità” hanno contribuito alla crisi. Il credito fiat sottoposto a forte leva finanziaria e praticamente scoperto – senza copertura in oro o energia – ha trasformato il sistema finanziario in uno schema di Ponzi, determinando inevitabilmente una massiccia espansione del credito.

In questo contesto rientrano anche l'imponente programma di indebitamento della Germania e, secondo i funzionari politici dell'UE, la guerra per procura in corso in Ucraina. Se il rubinetto del credito viene chiuso, il castello di carte crolla.

Concentrarsi sulla manipolazione dei tassi di interesse

L'obiettivo principale della BCE rimane la stabilizzazione dei mercati obbligazionari governativi, il settore più vulnerabile in caso di crisi. Profondamente legata al centro di potere dell'UE a Bruxelles, la banca centrale agisce quasi come un dipartimento di liquidità. Quando il panico colpisce il mercato obbligazionario, essa inizia a manipolare i rendimenti e a riequilibrare il mercato, come fece 15 anni fa.

I programmi di emergenza includono il Programma di acquisti nel settore pubblico (PSPP), col quale si acquisiscono titoli di stato per aumentare la liquidità, e le Transazioni monetarie definitive (OMT), attivate solo se i Paesi interessati si impegnano ad attuare riforme. Di recente introduzione è il Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), il quale consente alla BCE di acquistare titoli per ridurre le differenze di rendimento tra gli stati membri e garantire la trasmissione della politica monetaria. Questo strumento opera in gran parte in modo clandestino: gli interventi di mercato non sono sempre immediatamente visibili e possono essere effettuati gradualmente, anche tramite attori delegati, per evitare il panico sui mercati.

La politica della BCE può essere riassunta in modo semplice: in vista dell'imminente crollo del debito, il suo compito è manipolare l'intera curva dei rendimenti al ribasso per mantenere l'illusione di un debito pubblico sotto controllo e impedire agli investitori privati ​​di farsi prendere dal panico. La perseveranza della BCE è evidente nei corridoi di rendimento che i titoli di stato a lungo termine seguono da tempo.

Trasparenza? Praticamente inesistente. I rapporti segreti tra la BCE e i principali gruppi di capitali sono all'ordine del giorno. I mercati sono gestiti e manipolati attivamente: il libero mercato e la forza disciplinare dell'aumento dei tassi di interesse (i cosiddetti bond vigilantes) sono solo uno sbiadito ricordo del passato.

Cerotti di emergenza e pillole lenitive

In definitiva i nomi degli strumenti della BCE sono irrilevanti. La loro funzione principale è quella di attenuare le fluttuazioni di mercato a breve termine e di fornire ai policymaker un margine di manovra continuo per una burocrazia europea in continua espansione. La BCE stessa è diventata una forza maligna all'interno dell'Eurosistema: le riforme basate sul mercato sono impossibili finché i policymaker possono contare sul suo sostegno, che si tratti di programmi per il clima, di potenziamenti militari, o di altri progetti di dubbia natura.

La Commissione europea e la BCE mirano a istituire un meccanismo unificato per il debito, consolidare i debiti nazionali sotto l'egida della Commissione stessa e integrare la BCE come riserva di liquidità per stabilizzare i mercati. L'Europa si sta quindi orientando verso un socialismo centralizzato, con la BCE come fattore chiave.

In una crisi sistemica i principali pilastri dell'Eurozona – Francia, Italia e Germania – verrebbero trascinati in quella che possiamo definire spirale discendente. Sarebbe ingenuo credere che la situazione possa essere stabilizzata solo attraverso iniezioni di credito della BCE e misure di liquidità a breve termine.

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

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

Donald Trump is intent upon waging war on Venezuela  for allegedly supporting the trade in narcotics. Nonsense. The unspoken military agenda is that Venezuela is the World’s Number One Oil and Gas Economy. “And we want the Oil”… 

There is another unspoken U.S. military agenda:  The protection of the multibillion dollar illegal trade in narcotics.

Peru, Bolivia and Colombia are the major producers Worldwide of cocaine. 

Afghanistan is the “Number One” Worldwide opium producer: illegal heroin, morphine, and non-pharmaceutical grade opioids.

In the immediate wake of 9/11, US-NATO waged an all out  invasion of Afghanistan, which was casually accused by the Bush Adminstration of having attacked America on September 11, 2001

In the year 2000, the Afghan Taliban Government’ with the support of the United Nations, launched an initiative to ban the production of opium coupled with a program of crop substitution in favor of grain.

One of the objectives of the US-NATO led War against Afganistan? Was is intent to restore and protect the multi-billion trade in opium which had collapsed (following the decision of the Afghan government) by more than 90% in 2001?  (see graph below)

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post War, Oil and Narcotics appeared first on LewRockwell.

For more than a century, the Austrian School has warned that once money is severed from market discipline, every institution built upon it begins to deteriorate. Government expands without meaningful constraint. Savings are silently siphoned away. Investment becomes distorted by artificially cheap credit. War becomes politically easy. And political power gradually migrates from the productive class to those who control the printing press. Ludwig von Mises captured this dynamic in a simple but profound chain of logic: civilization requires rational economic calculation; calculation requires accurate prices; prices require free markets; free markets require voluntary exchange; and voluntary exchange requires secure private property rights—including property rights in money itself. When money becomes politicized, this chain collapses, and the social order degrades from within. Much of today’s economic and cultural instability—ballooning public debt, collapsing pensions, geopolitical adventurism, asset bubbles, and a widespread loss of institutional trust—flows directly from this rupture.

The Austrian tradition offers not only a diagnosis of this decline but a coherent remedy rooted in sound money, personal independence, and decentralized social structures. The following synthesis lays out these essential insights.

I. Money as a Market Institution

The Austrian School begins with a foundational truth: money originates from the market, not the state. Mises’s regression theorem explains why money must begin as a commodity valued for non-monetary uses. Gold became money because individuals voluntarily selected it for its durability, scarcity, divisibility, and universal desirability. No government committee invented monetary exchange; rather, governments merely inserted themselves into an already functioning market process.

Rothbard extends this point into the ethical realm. If money is a form of property, inflation represents an institutionalized form of counterfeiting—an indirect method of expropriation that debases the purchasing power of existing holders. Fractional-reserve banking intensifies this problem by issuing multiple claims to the same monetary unit, setting in motion cycles of artificial credit expansion, malinvestment, and inevitable recession. Sound money is therefore a natural product of voluntary exchange, whereas fiat money is a deliberate political imposition.

II. Fiat Money and the Expansion of State Power

Ron Paul’s Gold, Peace, and Prosperity demonstrates the political consequences of monetary debasement with striking clarity. Fiat money enables the modern warfare-welfare state by concealing costs that would otherwise provoke immediate public resistance. Wars that would be impossible under honest taxation become both frequent and prolonged when financed through the printing press. Welfare programs expand far beyond the limits that taxpayers would voluntarily support. Corporate bailouts reward politically connected firms at the expense of ordinary citizens. Inflation quietly transfers wealth from savers and wage earners to governments, central banks, and financial elites.

This dynamic reflects the Cantillon Effect, wherein those closest to the creation of new money benefit disproportionately, while those furthest from it bear the brunt of rising prices and distorted markets. A fiat system thus builds a political economy structurally biased toward centralization, dependence, and chronic crisis. No society can remain both fiat-based and genuinely free because a government empowered to create money at will can eventually purchase compliance, fund patronage, and finance conflict on a scale impossible under sound money.

III. The Classical Gold Standard: Kemmerer’s Blueprint

Edwin Kemmerer’s Gold and the Gold Standard provides the clearest institutional model of how a monetary system anchored in gold actually functioned. Under a genuine gold standard, redemption was automatic rather than discretionary; exchange rates were determined by the metal content of currencies rather than by bureaucratic preference; interest rates emerged from real savings rather than central-bank engineering; trade imbalances corrected themselves through flows of gold; and governments were restrained by the discipline imposed by convertibility.

The classical gold standard did not collapse due to inherent instability. It was intentionally dismantled because it constrained the ambitions of governments and central banks. Gold imposes discipline by linking monetary expansion to real resource costs. Fiat money abolishes that discipline by severing money from any external anchor, allowing political authorities to finance their projects without regard for long-term economic consequences.

IV. Bitcoin: Innovation with Structural Fragility

Bitcoin represents a genuine innovation in monetary technology. With its fixed supply, decentralized validation, and resistance to political manipulation, it offers a degree of monetary autonomy superior to any fiat alternative within the context of a functioning digital civilization. Yet Bitcoin’s strength is also its vulnerability. It relies entirely on the integrity of two large-scale, centralized infrastructures: the electrical grid and the telecommunications network.

A cyberattack, electromagnetic pulse, solar storm, prolonged blackout, or targeted political intervention can render Bitcoin temporarily inaccessible, even though the protocol itself remains mathematically secure. Bitcoin is therefore a conditional form of monetary independence. Its usefulness presupposes a technological environment that cannot be taken for granted. Gold, by contrast, remains sovereign money even in the total absence of external infrastructure.

V. Physical Property as the Ultimate Guarantor

The limits of purely digital independence become immediately apparent when the state can freeze bank accounts, restrict electricity, or seize digital assets by emergency decree. Real sovereignty requires control over tangible, seizure-resistant forms of property. Physical gold and silver held in one’s possession remain money in all conditions, requiring no electricity and no intermediaries. Firearms and ammunition constitute the final veto against violations of person and property. Calorie-dense food stores and the ability to replenish them insulate households from fragile and politically dependent logistics systems. Private water sources and filtration systems reduce reliance on municipal infrastructure. Off-grid energy—solar arrays, generators, and wood—provides autonomy from utility monopolies. Productive land and tools represent the oldest and most enduring factors of human independence.

Rothbard described such property as the concrete expression of self-ownership. Hoppe saw it as the material foundation of a private-law society. Hayek understood it as dispersed local knowledge made robust against institutional failure. No digital asset can substitute for these physical foundations of sovereignty.

VI. Decentralization Must Extend to the Social Layer

Monetary decentralization, while essential, is insufficient. Civilization itself is not a technical ledger but a fabric of cooperative relationships. Hoppe’s theory of covenant communities, Hayek’s insights on cultural evolution, Mises’s concept of catallaxy, and Rothbard’s vision of private governance all converge on the same conclusion: lasting liberty depends on strong, voluntary social bonds.

Families, churches, neighborhood associations, mutual-aid networks, and cooperative groups form the social infrastructure capable of weathering political instability or systemic failure. Atomized individuals, even with perfect money, remain vulnerable. Individuals embedded in thick, value-aligned communities become antifragile. The decentralization of money, production, and governance must therefore be accompanied by the decentralization of social life.

VII. The Austrian Case for Prepping

Prepping, properly understood, is simply Austrian economics applied to household risk. Mises observed that acting man uses scarce means to remove felt uneasiness. Long-term stores of food, water, and energy reflect rational anticipation of uncertainty rather than irrational fear. Hayek argued that no central authority can possess the local knowledge necessary to satisfy individual needs; preparation at the household and community level outperforms distant bureaucratic promises. Rothbard emphasized that the state functions as a predatory protection monopoly, and minimizing reliance on it is central to libertarian strategy. Hoppe demonstrated that private, norm-governed security is more efficient, adaptable, and reliable than bureaucratic monopoly.

Prepping is therefore not paranoia but a consistent application of Austrian principles to the realities of economic and political life. Households equipped with food stores, water independence, energy resilience, medical supplies, tools, and defensive capacity are simply adopting the same decentralization that Austrian theory recommends for markets and governance.

VIII. Thomas Massie: The Living Austrian Prototype

Congressman Thomas Massie provides a contemporary example of Austrian sovereignty translated into daily life. His homestead integrates off-grid solar power, private water systems, orchards, gardens, livestock, and extensive food preservation. He maintains machining, fabrication, and repair capabilities that shorten supply chains to the household level. He possesses the means of defense appropriate for a free citizen and holds physical gold and silver as the monetary base for real independence. Most importantly, he is part of a cohesive, value-aligned community that reinforces voluntary cooperation and mutual support. Massie successfully decentralizes the critical domains of life—energy, water, food, security, money, and social organization—while remaining fully engaged in the public sphere. His example demonstrates that Austrian decentralization is not theoretical but practical and achievable.

IX. The Tripod of Real Sovereignty

A free and resilient life rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars. The first is decentralized money: gold and silver function as final, seizure-resistant property, while Bitcoin can serve as a supplemental tool only so long as the grid remains intact. The second is decentralized survival: food, water, heat, energy, tools, medicine, and defensive means must be under direct personal control rather than mediated through fragile political or corporate structures. The third is decentralized community: human relationships capable of cooperation, trade, and mutual defense without state oversight form the social architecture necessary for order.

Money provides incorruptible value; preparedness provides incorruptible life support; and community provides incorruptible cooperation. When these three elements align, theoretical freedom becomes practical and durable. Mises mapped the logic of human action, Rothbard defended the ethics of self-ownership, Hayek revealed the superiority of dispersed knowledge, and Hoppe explained how private communities sustain order. The intellectual framework is complete, and the responsibility now lies with individuals to apply it.

Conclusion: The Window for Sovereignty Is Narrowing

Sound money, physical independence, and community resilience are not nostalgic artifacts from a simpler era. They are the structural foundations of a free society. Gold is not a relic, prepared households are not driven by fear, and decentralized communities are not regressive. Together they form the pillars of sovereignty in an age of unprecedented fragility.

Bitcoin may offer conditional advantages within a functioning digital environment, but it cannot replace physical property, local autonomy, or social capital. A civilization built solely on digital dependencies is one outage away from impotence. A civilization built on gold, land, skills, and community can withstand political and technological upheaval.

The choice is clear: build the full architecture of sovereignty now or risk drifting deeper into dependency. The window for action remains open, but it narrows every day.

The post The Austrian Blueprint for Real Sovereignty appeared first on LewRockwell.

Among the key insights of Austrian economics are that humans act and value is subjective. These observations seem obvious and uncontroversial…essentially truisms. But they’re often forgotten, neglected, or misunderstood.

Each person’s perspective is informed by innumerable variables that influence his values. An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way. An American believes a hundred years is a long time. Is either, neither, or each of them right? Who’s to say?

Would a woman rather receive a diamond ring or a gallon of water? As a former president of Harvard might put it, context matters. Is the lady sitting with her boyfriend on a beach, or stranded alone in the Sahara?

Some of us are willing to jump from a plane. Others can’t bring ourselves to board one. Fear of flying forces many people to drive, which puts them at greater statistical risk of ending up dead.

But they don’t care, even if they know the odds. People making such “illogical” choices are less concerned with probabilities of death than with easing their mind however long they’re alive.

Fair enough. To these people…as with those who toss salt over their shoulders or avoid sidewalk cracks to spare their mother’s back…peace of mind, even if analytically dubious, is worth looking superstitious or silly.

The “Greater Good”

Their choices may seem irrational, but they’re not necessarily unreasonable. Our basket of preferences are a blend of desires and aversions composing a unique recipe for each individual.

This is why a “greater good” is impossible to impose. This elusive concept exists only as an evolving compilation of personal preferences. No one (nor any group of people) can decree what it is, because it can only be known after each person makes uncoerced decisions he thinks will enhance his happiness.

The “greater good” is merely an amalgamation of each individual’s unique desires, which are revealed only thru action, and are otherwise impossible for even their closest friends or nearest relatives to surmise.

Much of the time, we don’t even know them ourselves! That a few elected or appointed officials could know what’s best for millions (or billions!) of people they’ll never meet is preposterous.

Passing laws prohibiting or requiring that everyone conform to an arbitrary “common interest” will require people give up something they value more than whatever edict elected or appointed officials decree.

This doesn’t improve society. It reduces standards of living (except for that of anointed authorities enforcing their own preferences).

The only way to reveal what everyone wants is to leave them free to make choices for themselves. Popular desire is revealed only thru individual decisions reflected in voluntary actions.

No one engages in activities he thinks will make him worse off, regardless whether anyone else would make the same decision.

We do things because we think they’ll improve our circumstances…sooner or later. Each person’s preferences are relative, unique, and fluid over time. If they weren’t, exchange would be impossible.

If everyone valued everything equally, trade could only benefit one party by harming another. But since valuation varies, markets materialize…because participants believe what they give is worth less than what they get. Otherwise, they wouldn’t swap.

An Essential Insight

This is an essential insight, and the key theme of a terrific book. The Secret of Selling Anything is a compilation of a couple unpublished manuscripts investor, philosopher, and two-time presidential candidate Harry Browne wrote in the late 1960s. After half a century, the lessons are timeless and his message endures.

Browne asserts successful selling isn’t about being slick, manipulative, or smooth. The best salesmen needn’t be (and usually aren’t) overly enthusiastic or naturally extroverted.

Nor must they “motivate” their prospects. They merely need to discover what already motivates them. This is done by asking some questions, and understanding a few basic laws of human nature.

Foremost among these is that all humans seek happiness. Everything they do is intended to increase what Browne calls their “mental feeling of well-being”. Individuals take no action without thinking it’ll make them better off.

People are always seeking “profit”, which Browne defines as an increase in happiness by replacing one situation with another. Yet happiness is relative, and resources scarce.

Each person has different desires he thinks will improve his condition, yet no one has infinite time, property, energy, or knowledge to bring endless demand to ultimate fruition.

For unforced exchange to occur, all parties must believe they will profit. In a free market, no one will intentionally sacrifice his happiness to satisfy someone else. He may forgo physical comfort or monetary reward, but only if ceding those pleasures increases his overall contentment.

We must serve others to sustain our lives. Very little of what we need to survive is the exclusive product of our own efforts. That’s especially true for most Americans.

In a higher order civilization dependent on division of labor, exchange is essential. We serve others to receive what we want. The more efficiently we do so, the greater profit (be it financial or psychic) we realize and higher success we attain.

What matters is the value other parties place on the services we provide. How much our offerings are desired is reflected in prices people are willing to pay. And that is part of what salesmen need to sell.

As a corporate pricing professional for a couple decades, I consistently tried to make this point. Regardless how beneficial we think our offering is…or how much effort we expend providing it…if potential customers find it irrelevant or objectionable, they won’t accept it for whatever compensation we seek.

How to Sell Anything

Each person’s happiness depends on the value ultimate consumers place on his services. Whatever any particular production, distribution, sales, or marketing process is worth ultimately derives from the subjective benefit end users receive.

No one buys a product. He buys the solution the product provides. Customers don’t care about a vendor’s lawnmower; they’re concerned about their own lawn.

This is one of the essential precepts of economics, and of Browne’s book. Another is that most people ignore this point, and install their personal preferences in place of what other people want.

Too many entrepreneurs start businesses because they crave status or want wealth. But what matters is how well businessmen can decipher pain points of potential buyers, and how many people they can assist by supplying superior solutions with quality service at reasonable prices.

If they do, all parties will profit by the exchange. To make a sale, we must know what’s in it for the other guy, and why he should want to pay what we choose to charge.

Relationships and commerce are based on mutual advantage. In a free market, no one can get without giving.

Those who understand that can sell anything.

This article was originally published on Pretium Insights.

The post How To Sell Anything appeared first on LewRockwell.