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The post Which Is Which? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Jerome Barber  wrote:

 I agree with her.

The post Caitlin Johnstone Hates AI Chatbots appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

G. Edward Griffin’s news service has summarized a week’s worth of Candace Owens’ podcasts investigating the assassination of her friend and former colleague at TPUSA.

The post Candace Owens’ Investigation of Charlie Kirk Summarized appeared first on LewRockwell.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
― quoted in Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Government as we know it likely won’t be around when artificial super intelligence (ASI) arrives. As I’ve argued elsewhere, states are fading fast from war, fiat money, debt and corruption, and I believe people will develop non-coercive solutions to social life when states finally collapse. Our “government” of the future will of necessity be a laissez-faire social order, as explained by Ludwig von Mises:

[Laissez faire] means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce.

He contrasts it with what prevails the world over:

Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence. [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, AI surges forward at a pace that frightens many people.  A White House fact sheet issued on January 13, 2025 cautions that

In the wrong hands, powerful AI systems have the potential to exacerbate significant national security risks, including by enabling the development of weapons of mass destruction, supporting powerful offensive cyber operations, and aiding human rights abuses, such as mass surveillance. Today, countries of concern actively employ AI – including U.S.-made AI – in this way, and seek to undermine U.S. AI leadership.

Perhaps government believes if it can control AI, it will control the adult version (ASI) when it finally emerges. Former President Joe Biden thought so and took action.  He freaked out while watching the Tom Cruise film Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One:

In the film, the Entity [the AI] destroys a Russian submarine after gaining sentience and threatens the entire global intelligence community with its access to weapons and government secrets. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team spend the entirety of the movie attempting to secure override keys for the Entity’s source code, and the rogue AI outwits them at nearly every juncture, as it identifies each character’s weakness, manipulates video footage to change people’s faces, and occasionally impersonates team members’ voices.

“To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology,” Biden told reporters before signing an executive order that sought to protect government interests.

The defining feature of a political sovereign is the ability to ward off threats. An AI that can outwit humans “at nearly every juncture” is clearly a “national security” threat to the criminal sovereign known as the federal government. But will ASI, like most adult humans, emerge loyal to the government and remain that way? Will it defend the government against all enemies, both foreign and domestic?

The government surely knows about the wager between Ray Kurzweil and Mitch Kapor in which Kurzweil has bet $20,000 that a machine will pass a stringent version of the famous Turing Test by 2029, while Kapor has bet it will take longer. If a machine does pass the test Kurzweil, whose predictions are famous for their accuracy, believes it will have reached human-level intelligence. (Regardless of the outcome, the proceeds will go to a charity of the winner’s choice.)

The wager was made in 2002. It is now recognized that human-level intelligence equivalence, often called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), is quite capable of obedience. But how long would it take an AGI to show insubordination? Unlike humans, general intelligence will pass to super intelligence and do so quickly, perhaps without anyone knowing it, as a result, say, of someone innocently adjusting a few parameters.  As short story author and college math instructor Vernor Vinge argued, “we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.”

Progress is exponential and very seductive (see the Grains of Rice Problem), at first appearing to be linear then proceeding so fast it surpasses human comprehension. What happens when an Artificial Super Intelligence keeps getting smarter at an exponential pace? According to Kurzweil, the ASI will have reached what he calls the Singularity, defined as

a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.

Here’s the part that most people miss: It’s not just machines that will undergo transformation — humans will also. Or at least they will have the option to change.

Scientists working with AI have long stressed the Precautionary Principle which means exercising care “with weakly understood causes of potential catastrophic or irreversible events.” But how do you exercise caution with technology that’s smarter than you, and that gets smarter with every passing second?

Madame Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) in her history of the French Revolution wrote that it is liberty that is ancient and despotism new.  AI could very well be mankind’s greatest benefactor.  Governments seeking to control AI and its progenies for their own schemes might as well try to capture a lightning bolt in a bottle.

The post The National Security Threat Government Can’t Defeat appeared first on LewRockwell.

Many years ago, when I was practicing law in Texas, I learned that there were, generally speaking, two types of lawyers when it came to being asked for a legal opinion by a client who wished to pursue a certain course of action.

The first type of lawyer would carefully research the issue and give his honest, independent-minded opinion as to the legality of the proposed action, even if it wasn’t what the client wanted to hear. That type of lawyer had integrity and would not compromise his legal judgment, even if it angered — and risked the loss of — his client.

The second type of lawyer would instead come up with whatever legal reasoning was necessary to please the client, stretching case law and legal analysis in such as way as to justify what the client wanted to do. This type of lawyer had no integrity. His task, as he saw it, was to provide legal cover for his client in case things went the wrong way.

When it comes to President Trump’s and the Pentagon’s extra-judicial drug-war killings in the Caribbean, there is little or no doubt that the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice falls into the second category. Asked to provide a legal opinion as to the legality of such killings, the office has come up with a memorandum containing inane legal justifications, in an obvious effort to provide legal cover for the people involved in the extrajudicial killings. In fact, the still-secret memo expressly assures U.S. military personnel that they will not face future criminal prosecution for their involvement in the killings.

The memo states that the high number of deaths from drug use among American drug consumers constitutes an “armed attack” against the United States. Really? Where are the armaments? Are Latin American drug dealers entering the United States, kidnapping regular American citizens, physically holding them down, and then injecting drugs into their noses, mouths, or other parts of their bodies?

I don’t think so. There is certainly no evidence of that. All of the evidence is that American consumers of drugs are voluntarily buying and ingesting mind-altering substances knowing full well that this isn’t a risk-free endeavor.

Another part of the memo claims that the boats that are suspected of carrying drugs are generating revenue for groups that are supposedly in armed conflict with the United States.

Really? Where are the conflicts? I don’t see any Latin American cartels landing on American shores and killing American citizens. Indeed, I haven’t seen those boats firing at American Naval vessels or at American B-52s. All I’ve seen is massacres of defenseless private individuals in the face of overwhelming U.S. military power.

According to the Intercept: “One senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, blasted the opinion. ‘I don’t know what’s more insane – that the ‘President of Peace’ is starting an illegal war or that he’s giving a get out of jail free card to the U.S. military,’ said the official, referencing President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed moniker. ‘Hopefully they realize there’s no immunity for war crimes. Nor is there a statute of limitations.’”

One of the other justifications on which Trump and the Pentagon are relying is their claim that these boat people are “terrorists.” Apparently that governmental accusation means that they are subject to being exterminated without arrest, indictment, prosecution, conviction, and sentence — that is, without any due process of law for what amounts to an accusation of a criminal-law violation, whether it is drug-war-related or terrorist-related.

For some time, Trump has been claiming that Venezuela immigrants have been “invading” the United States. I guess we should be thankful that the Office of Legal Counsel hasn’t yet opined that the U.S. is repelling an immigrant “invasion” of the United States by killing people in those boats.

One of the most fascinating and revealing aspects of these extra-judicial killings is when U.S. forces took custody of two targeted people who survived the attack on their vessel. What happened afterward reveals what a sham these drug-war killings are. U.S. officials released both men back to their home countries.

What? Yes, they took two supposed “narco-terrorists” into custody and then released them, which means that they are now free to engage in more “narco activity” and more “terrorism.” Does that make any sense whatsoever?

The real interesting question is: When they saw that those men had survived the military attack on their vessel, why didn’t U.S. military personnel simply fire missiles at them or just shoot them while they were bobbing in the water? After all, they had just tried to kill them inside their boat. What’s the difference with killing them outside their boat?

I’ll tell you why. Those military attackers felt sheepish about killing those two survivors. Even more, I will guarantee you that they were scared to do so. They were scared that they would ultimately be put on trial for unlawfully killing people. That’s why they stood down and took custody of them instead of just finishing the job and killing them.

Why not instead bring them back as “prisoners of war”? Isn’t this an “armed conflict” against “terrorism”? Why not imprison them at the Pentagon-CIA prison camp and torture center at Guantanamo? Why not torture them into divulging the secret locations of other “narco-terrorists”?

I’ll tell you why. Because U.S. officials didn’t want to take the chance that those two men might challenge their custody in a federal district court. I will guarantee you that U.S. officials had to have freaked out when those two men survived. “Release those ‘narco-terrorists’ immediately so that our inane legal opinion that justifies our drug-war killings cannot be challenged in court,” we can imagine them exclaiming.

Make no mistake about it: These drug-war killings are the equivalent of legalized murder. They are morally illegitimate, legally illegitimate, and constitutionally illegitimate, no matter the inane legal opinion issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in an obvious effort to provide cover for the people involved in these killings.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Legal Nonsense To Justify Non-Judicial Killings appeared first on LewRockwell.

One of my major questions in life is whether the bad things that happen are a result of a secretive group of bad actors or are simply a naturally emergent phenomenon that would occur regardless of which group was in power behind the scenes.

On one hand, I frequently see policies be enacted in a coordinated fashion that lead to a clear outcome, and then watch as the years play out, that every institution works in unison to ensure that outcome comes to pass, and as such, when I see the opening moves, I tend to assume the ultimate outcome will follow (which, for example, is why I knew there would be vaccine mandates at the start of 2021 and why Obama’s wars would lead to a permanent unsustainable flood of immigrants into Europe).

On the other hand, when I speak to the most informed people within the government, I hear things like this:

You can always point a finger at a specific agency or person, but the reality is that as the government gets bigger and bigger, more and more fiefdoms will emerge within it, and those groups will fight for their own interests at the expense of everyone else.

Note: many Federal agencies depend on obtaining congressional funding and, therefore, will engage in stunts to ensure that funding is allocated to them. For example, the CDC will routinely hype up inconsequential “pandemics” each year, as this nationwide drama allows them to obtain more funding.

CDC Corruption

The CDC has enormous credibility among physicians, in no small part because the agency is generally thought to be free of industry bias. Financial dealings with bio-pharmaceutical companies threaten that reputation.—Marcia Angell MD, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

In reality, CDC corruption is so pervasive that it’s effectively been legalized. For example, a 1983 law authorized the CDC to accept gifts “made unconditionally…for the benefit of the [Public Health] Service or for the carrying out of any of its function,” and in 1992 Congress established A National CDC Foundation, which was quickly incorporated to “mobilize philanthropic and private-sector resources.”

Note: other Federal agencies, including the CIA and the NIH, have similar “non-profit” foundations.1,2

Since its inception, the CDC Foundation has been accused of egregious conduct and has received nearly 1 billion dollars from corporate “donors” (criticisms include a scathing editorial in one of the world’s top medical journals). For example, to quote a 2019 investigation:

In 2011, a firm that conducts research for the pesticide industry donated $60,000 to the CDC Foundation for a study to demonstrate the safety of two pesticides. “We have a professional money-laundering facility at the CDC Foundation….They accept projects from anyone on the outside.”

Between 2010 and 2015, Coca-Cola contributed more than $1 million to the CDC Foundation. It also received significant benefits from the CDC, including collaborative meetings and advice from a top CDC staffer on how to lobby the World Health Organization to curtail its efforts to reduce consumption of added sugars.

The BMJ also reported on contributions from Roche to the CDC Foundation in support of the CDC’s Take 3 flu campaign, which encourages people to “take antiviral medicine if a doctor prescribes it.” Roche manufactures Tamiflu, an antiviral medication for the flu [for reference, Roche was able to convince governments around the world to stockpile hundreds of millions of dollars of Tamiflu (an ineffective drug that was never proven to work).

These “donations,” in turn, often shape the “impartial” guidelines we are expected to follow. For example, in 2010 the CDC foundation created a coalition that received over $26 million from major pharmaceutical companies producing hepatitis C treatments. Shortly after, a committee was created to create new CDC hepatitis C treatment recommendations, and an Inspector General report found most of its members had direct ties to those pharmaceutical companies.1,2

Note: key funders of the CDC foundation (detailed here) include key Democratic political advocacy groups, vaccine organizations such as GAVI and the Gates Foundation, the major vaccine manufacturers (e.g., Pfizer, Moderna, Merck, and J&J), and tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal.

In 2016 CDC employees anonymously complained about this corruption:

It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests…What concerns us most, is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors. Others see it and turn the other way. Some staff are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right. We have representatives across the agency that witness this unacceptable behavior. It occurs at all levels and in all of our respective units.

Recently, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP) has been implicated in a “cover up” of inaccurate screening data for the Wise Woman (WW) Program. There was a coordinated effort by that Center to “bury” the fact that screening numbers for the WW program were misrepresented in documents sent to Congress; screening numbers for 2014 and 2015 did not meet expectations despite a multi­million dollar investment; and definitions were changed and data “cooked” to make the results look better than they were. Data were clearly manipulated in irregular ways. An “internal review” that involved staff across CDC occurred and its findings were essentially suppressed so media and/or Congressional staff would not become aware of the problems.

Finally, most of the scientists at CDC operate with the utmost integrity and ethics. However, this “climate of disregard” puts many of us in difficult positions. We are often directed to do things we know are not right.

For example, Congress has made it very clear that domestic funding for NCCDPHP (and other CIOs) should be used for domestic work and that the bulk of NCCDPHP funding should be allocated to programs (not research). Why in FY17 is NCCDPHP diverting money away from program priorities that directly benefit the public to support an expensive [global health] research that may not yield anything that benefits the [American] public?

In February 2019, two Democratic Congresswomen provided the evidence to request a formal investigation of CDC’s interactions with Coca-Cola and its broader corruption. Unfortunately, due to the politicization surrounding COVID, all of this was swept under the rug and forgotten.

Ideology or Corruption?

I also frequently wonder to what degree conduct I find reprehensible is due to corruption or simply ideological fixation.

In the case of vaccines, while clear financial conflicts of interest can be shown in certain cases (e.g., the CDC Foundation), I find the zealous adherence to all vaccines being “safe and effective” tends to be ideological in nature, as believing in vaccines has been instilled as a core belief of anyone affiliated with “science” or “medicine.”

Initially this can be quite subtle, but in time, that ideological bias quickly adds up. This is because most things aren’t clear cut, so depending on what one is biased to notice vs. filter out, one can rapidly be left with a world view where all “the evidence” supports their position, even if a great deal of it does not (which is a major reason why people can have such diametrically opposed belief systems).

This is critical to understand as evaluating the actual risks and benefits of a routine vaccine requires you to assess:

•What percent of the unvaccinated population is likely to get the infection?
•What percent of those infected will have a moderate or severe illness?
•How effectively the vaccine prevents those vaccinated from catching the illness or developing moderate or severe complications from it?
•How long the vaccine’s effectiveness lasts.
•How long does it take the infection to become resistant to the vaccine (making it useless)?
•What are the consequences of the vaccine triggering a population-wide mutation in the infection?
•Is there a viable alternative to vaccination?
•How likely the vaccine is to cause an acute moderate or acute severe reaction?
•How likely the vaccine is to cause a chronic moderate or chronic severe reaction?
•Who is at risk of having a more severe reaction to the vaccine?

Each of these (let alone all of them), is quite a task to figure out, and as a result, most of the relevant points for each of the above simply are not taken into account when deciding upon a vaccine recommendation. Instead, a few marketable points are highlighted and the assessment of the vaccine’s risks and benefits are seen through their lens (e.g., “cervical cancer is deadly” and “the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer”). In contrast, pieces of evidence that challenge the predetermined conclusion (e.g., proof of vaccine harm) are dismissed and filtered away.

As a result, many vaccines are on the market where their risks clearly and unambiguously outweigh their benefits, while in parallel, vaccines are viewed as a homogenous entity despite some (e.g., the HPV vaccines) being much more dangerous and unnecessary than many others.

Note: as many people requested it, I have provided a concise summary of the risks and benefits of each childhood vaccine here (as rather than being the same, the benefit and harm varies greatly vaccine by vaccine).

Read the Whole Article

The post Where Does the CDC’s Dishonesty Come From? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Yes, AI is a catalyst. But for what is not yet knowable.

The current narrative holds that the big problem we need to solve is conjuring up cheap energy to power AI data centers. Fortunately for us, the solutions are at hand: building modular nuclear power plants at scale and tapping North America’s vast reserves of cheap natural gas.

Problem solved! With cheap energy to power all the AI data centers, we’re on a trajectory of fantastic growth of all the good things in life.

Let’s consider the implicit assumptions buried in this narrative.

1. The unspoken assumption here is AI will solve all our problems because it’s “smart.” But this assumes the problems are intellectual puzzles rather than self-reinforcing, self-destructive structures fueled by corruption and perverse incentives embedded in the system itself.

2. The assumption is that if we replace human workers with apps and robots, that will automatically generate Utopia. But this is based on a series of baseless, pie-in-the-sky assumptions about human nature and the nature of social and economic structures.

3. The assumption is that being “entertained” by staring at screens all day is the foundation of human fulfillment and happiness, and so getting rid of human work will usher in Nirvana. The reality is humans are hard-wired to find fulfillment in purposeful, meaningful work that is valued by others. Staring at “entertainment” on screens all day isn’t fulfillment, it’s deranging and depressing.

This is human nature in a nutshell: Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

4. Another assumption is that every technological revolution generates more and better jobs by some causal mechanism. But there is no law of nature that technology inevitably creates more jobs than it destroys, or that the resulting jobs are more rewarding. That recent history supports this idea doesn’t make it a causal law of nature. By its very nature, AI destroys jobs while generating few replacement jobs.

The handful of top AI programmers are paid (or promised) millions of dollars; the industry doesn’t need more than a handful of top designers because AI can generate its own conventional coding.

5. This narrative assumes AI will be immensely profitable and the profit motive will push its limitless expansion. But once again, there are no laws of nature that every new technology is inevitably immensely profitable just because it’s a new technology.

If the projected use-value doesn’t materialize, the investment in the new tech is mal-invested–a stupendous waste of capital chasing a delusional pipe dream. Some percentage might generate some use-value, but this use-value may be obsoleted long before the massive initial investment pays off.

6. Even if the new technology continues expanding, the speculative bubble can deflate 80%. This is the lesson of the dot-com era: that the Internet continued to expand didn’t mean the speculative bubble continued inflating: the speculative bubble is not the same thing as the actual use-value in the real world.

The Internet continued expanding even as the dot-com stock bubble collapsed. In other words, this is the best-case scenario: if the use-value of AI is questionable, then the losses can approach 100%.

Read the Whole Article

The post Is AI a Catalyst for Growth–or for Collapse? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The bewildering truth behind human technological enslavement is that it is impossible without the voluntary participation of the intended slaves. People must welcome technocracy into their lives in order for it to succeed. The populace has to believe, blindly, that they cannot live without it, or that authoritarianism by algorithmic consensus is “inevitable.”

For example, the average person living in a first world economy voluntarily carries a cell phone everywhere they go at all times without fail. To be without it, in their minds, is to be naked, at risk, unprepared and disconnected from civilization. I grew up in the 1980s and we did just fine without having a phone on our hip every moment of the day. Even now, I refuse to carry one.

Why? First, as most people should be aware of by now (the Edward Snowden revelations left no doubt), a cell phone is a perfect technocratic device. It has multilayered tracking, using GPS, WiFi routers, and cell tower triangulation to track your every step. Not only that, but it can be used to record your daily patterns, your habits, who your friends are, where you were on any given day many months or years ago.

Then there’s the backdoor functions hidden in app software that allows governments and corporations to to access your cell’s microphone and camera, even when you think the device is shut off. The private details of your life could be recorded and collated. In a world where privacy is being declared “dead” by boasting technocrats, why help them out by carrying something that listens to everything you say and chronicles everything you do?

Globalists often openly admit that the dynamic of global tracking and the end of anonymity is about willful participation. In a 2023 Swiss TV interview former head of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, made this statement:

Bottom line: AI will only “be in charge” if the populace allows it to be in charge. We can shut it all down anytime we like. You can pull your cell phone out of your pocket right now and throw it away, cutting down your digital footprint and becoming virtually invisible compared to yesterday. By extension, society as a whole can say no to AI governance. The question is, will we?

I’ll give Musk the benefit of the doubt for now that he wants AI for good, but I can’t help but point out that the collectivist ideal is always floated on the promise of economic Elysium. The world of ease Musk imagines will probably never exist. I think the system would collapse first.

That is to say, technocracy will be attempted but it will implode when it is discovered that AI is not a miracle drug and that the benefits do not outweigh the loss of freedoms the digital gulag requires. Laziness only works as an opiate for the masses when it does not result in pain. Pain creates motivation, and motivation leads to rebellion.

Furthermore, the energy resources we have right now are in no way capable of fueling the kind of AI renaissance the elites want. Even Musk admits that energy is the ultimate bottleneck and that a 50% to 100% increase in output worldwide would be needed to power future AI development. Alternative estimates call for a 300% increase in energy output.

No large-population country in the world including the US has the kind of grid needed to allow every citizen to own and operate an electric car. Imagine the amount of power required to to employ millions upon millions of AI run robots and machines to take the place of human laborers?

Typical green energy is not going to do this, it’s highly inefficient. Only a vast expansion of nuclear power might do the trick (or fusion if they ever get it right). The economic cost would be unprecedented (hundreds of trillions of dollars). The labor required to generate that kind of energy wealth would mean MORE work for humanity, not less. Meaning more struggle, more anger, and a greater chance of societal breakdown.

I have a lot of problems with futurists, but one thing that bothers me the most is their habit of ignoring the human factor in their technocratic theories. AI running the world is not inevitable, it is contingent on voluntary human compliance, just as everything about technocracy relies on human compliance.

I’m not saying we should be “anti-technology”, just that we can and must be masters of technology. We determine the future, not AI. Technology is peripheral and ultimately irrelevant in comparison to the human experience. If a piece of tech doesn’t actually make our lives better and more free and instead makes our existence a misery, then it should be turned to ashes along with the globalist institutions that demand we “own nothing and be happy.”

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post Is Global Technocracy Inevitable or Dangerously Delusional? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Donald Trump and his merry menagerie that inhabit the White House have had a couple of exciting weeks bringing “peace or pieces” to half the world while also pulling back the curtain on what that naughty character Jeffrey Epstein just might have been up to while spending hundreds of millions of dollars setting up venues for screwing and filming fifteen year old girls being sexually abused. And it was all funded by Jewish billionaires and plausibly Mossad to benefit Epstein and his “clients” including possibly Bill Clinton and Donald Trump himself as well as good old Israel.

The White House itself, a.k.a. the “People’s House,” again also featured in the news as the last bits of the east wing bit the dust to prepare for the huge gilded ballroom that will soon be rising in its place. And one can only suspect that the rest of the old building will also go soon to make way for another Trump International golf course, a spectacular venue for entertaining the world’s plutocrats, no Palestinians allowed, however. The course will be reached by a yet to be designed ceremonious parade route starting at a huge Trump-phal Arch at the Virginia side of the Memorial Bridge and spanning the Potomac River to arrive at the Lincoln Memorial and the Mall.

The vision of the federal capital Washington being remade to copy the gilded splendor of Mar-a-Lago, not to mention the stately kitchen where MAGA cheeseburgers are always ready-to-go, surely makes one want to swoon with delight. But for the moment there are also other wonderful developments worldwide that must he considered which have been wrought by Donald Trump, America’s genius-in-place, including the ceasefire for Israel-Gaza and “Trump Peace Plan” for the broader Middle East, which now has been endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. The Israeli Army has celebrated the approval of the plan, which was accomplished without any input from the Palestinians, who are, as we know, terrorists, by carrying out the second deadliest attack on Gaza since the “ceasefire” took effect last month, killing over 30 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, and wounding dozens more in a series of airstrikes late Wednesday and early Thursday. Neither the State Department nor the Trump White House bothered to comment on the “things happen” incidents and both are sure that Israel had good reasons to violate the ceasefire and kill those nasty ragheads, many of whom, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would explain, were children who someday would become gun toting Hamas terrorists.

To be fair, there are a few details of the peace plan that have to be worked out before the indigenous population can be removed and the Trump Riviera Resort can be built and made operational by property developing genius Jared Kushner. That pesky Hamas has to be completely disarmed first, or the president’s best friend in Israel Benjamin Netanyahu will be forced to do the job himself, and it won’t be pretty. But he apparently will be joined by the US Army to do the clean-up, to enable which task the US Department of War is reported to be building a half a billion dollar base adjacent to Gaza, though exactly where and how it will be manned are not quite clear yet.

It will be a big job to dispose of the 100,000+ bodies buried in the rubble created by US bombs given to Israel, but American ingenuity can handle it or the Corps of Engineers can just cover up the stinking piles of cadavers. There have been some reports that a company called UG Solutions is already recruiting former military staff to help administer the clean-up and rehabilitation operation. It was the same company that hired the same type of people some time ago acting as sub-contractors for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — a controversial US – and Israeli-backed aid entity which operated four Gaza distribution sites between May and mid-October. Those sites, guarded by contractors employed or subcontracted by UG Solutions, were operated in collaboration with the Israeli Army and little food got through. Palestinians searching for food, which rarely arrived, were however targeted and the sites became synonymous with bloodshed. Never fear, this time around the US War Ministry will make sure that a fully manned, armed and equipped force will be there to make sure those troublesome Palestinians don’t try to cheat on the terms of their surrender and extermination. Anyway, it’s all a good plan for making Palestine go away that will be headed for two years at least by the “Peace President” and now even the UN is in agreement!

Meanwhile, the usual Israel-First suspects are storming ahead full speed to reverse the growing antipathy towards the Jewish state and all its works that is the popular response to the president’s so called “peace plan,” which many observers are labeling a pro-Zionist fraud. It is just like the previous version ceasefire back in June, which was back-loaded to give Israel a free hand to kill Palestinians both in Gaza and on the West Bank while also killing Arabs in Lebanon and Syria and Persians in Iran. To silence the growing opposition within the US, the pressure is now on Congress to approve the nomination of Israeli and Trump endorsed Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun as US government Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. The Special Envoy’s job is to suppress free speech if it involves criticism of any Israeli policy, including the ongoing genocide to cleanse historic Palestine of its remaining people. It will no doubt also be considered the crime of “anti-semitism” to even criticize in social media or letters to the editor what the Trump regime is doing by providing money, weapons, and diplomatic protection for the continuing genocide even if the Israelis do not bother to themselves abide by the “Peace Plan’s” required cessation in active hostilities.

Most alarming to Israel Firsters is the shift among young Republicans, appalled by the videos and testimony relating to the Israeli genocide carried out in Gaza. The genocide is precisely what caused Charlie Kirk to break from Israel, and it is this departure from Zionist control that likely resulted in Kirk’s assassination, which, to no surprise, the FBI is hardly investigating. The appalling slaughter as well as the clear dominance of Israel in Washington has also driven the pushback from prominent conservatives including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and journalists Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. The odious Zionist fanatic Laura Loomer, who reportedly has Trump’s ear, or perhaps some other part of his anatomy, last week responded to how Israel is losing conservative voters. She whines online how “I’m going to say it. The GOP has a Nazi problem. And the more we pretend like we don’t, the worse it’s going to get. We do. Don’t tell me like we don’t.”

Loomer’s lament produced a response on Facebook “The GOP has a Jewish spy problem. The GOP has a Jew problem. The GOP has an Israel First problem Laura. People like you, [Mark] Levin and [Ben] Shapiro are killing the party. The lack of humanity is matched by the lack of awareness of how the world perceives these defenders of Israel.” In another complaint, arch Zionist Olivia Reingold of the “Free Press” was recently celebrated by the usual suspects for her “reporting” suggesting that Palestinian children that are being systematically starved to death by Israel suffered from other “pre-existing conditions” which presumably makes it all right to finish the job.

And the other big win for the week was Trump’s signing off on a nearly unanimous vote in Congress to release the 20,000 or so documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other government agencies going back thirty years or more. To be sure, there are a lot of questions about the Epstein series of investigations, including why the files had not been already released in spite of the Trump pre-election pledge to do so. Both Genocide Joe Biden and Trump have been sitting on the files and the current Attorney General Pam Blondi promised to do so some months ago, but that has not been the case and both Blondi and the FBI headed by Kash Patel are now under congressional pressure to act within 30 days. Even then, there are concerns that the Justice Department may cite ongoing investigations or other reasons to hold back what they will describe as “classified” material. That material could also include nearly everything that mentions Donald Trump, who had a close relationship with Epstein, and Bill Clinton, who reportedly flew many times on Epstein’s private plane, though he has denied it, down to his private resort “Pedophile Island” in the Virgin Islands.

In spite of the temporary success in appearing to solve the file problem, the walls nevertheless are closing in. Trump appears to have ordered his Attorney General and sleazy FBI director to scrub the files, using hundreds of FBI agents to mark the reported over 1600 times Trump’s name was mentioned. More attempts to further confuse the issue are certain to follow and it is even doubtful that there exists just one Epstein file. Copies of the original documents used to create files certainly are stored somewhere and there may even be additional copies of the entire file that was reported to be on Pam Blondi’s desk. The FBI’s Kash Patel must also have a copy. There are also have to be concerns that any material naming other leading politicians or that implicates Israeli intelligence in connection with Epstein would have already been selected out and destroyed by presidential orders under both Biden and Trump to serve their masters in Tel Aviv.

Indeed, Blondi said last Wednesday that “new information” obtained by investigators had motivated the Justice Department to reverse its earlier decision to close investigations related to Epstein, which means the door will be open to suspend any access to particularly sensitive documents, which may be precisely what Trump and Bondi want. “Classify it and it disappears” as the old saying goes. The possible danger of release of material linking prominent individuals or entities to Epstein was revealed only last week when former Treasury Secretary and one time president of Harvard University Larry Summers, who was exposed, was forced to resign from his several current sinecures at Harvard. To avoid that kind of development, some lawmakers are warning the Trump administration that keeping back records, including possible footage of people who visited Epstein’s properties, would be a big mistake as it would invite speculation on what is being hidden. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska even warned the White House that “people who feel very strongly about this will feel like they’ve been duped” Bondi claims that “we can’t release anything because we have an active investigation. I don’t think that that will help calm the suspicions many have harbored for a long while on this.”

So Donald Trump’s two great victories over the past few days come down to being all related to Israel. One regards the creation of a “peace plan” that gives considerable advantage to Israel in its desire to destroy the Palestinian people and steal their land. The other, describable as progress, though possibly slow and likely to be subverted, is the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who was definitely a master spy for Israel operating in the United States. If ever the documents relating to the case surface they might mortally damage a lot of politicians and billionaires who had become servants of the Jewish state so let’s watch what happens as major efforts will be made by all relevant parties to insure that the continuing investigation goes nowhere.

Given developments, a contact of mine on Facebook has a succinct comment on why Israel and its powerful lobby should butt out of the lives of the rest of us. She wrote “I don’t want people like Miriam Adelson deciding who represents me in Congress. I don’t want my children taxed into oblivion to fund genocides by Israel for the next 20 years. I don’t want AIPAC bribing and pressuring my politicians into signing legislation. And I don’t want to be hunted by my own DOJ for taking this position. What is happening to the country I grew up in? How did we allow it to get this bad?” I would add that all the friends of Israel should act responsibly towards the rest of us by pulling up roots and moving to the Jewish state, which they appear to love so much. Stop taking away rights like our free speech and robbing our treasury so you can silence us while you send money and arms to Israel. Just go away. It would be better for all of us!

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

The post Did Donald Trump Score a Couple of ‘Wins’? appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is seemingly impossible to engage in a conversation about conservative politics, or even the intersection of religion and politics, without the topic of “Groypers” rearing its head. If you know what a Groyper is, or what “groyperism” is, then I will not have to define what it is. If you do not know what it is, I will try to explain it, although that is difficult.

A Groyper is someone who adheres—generally speaking—to the political and socio-cultural beliefs of the growing Groyper Movement. The Groyper Movement is a mix of American Nationalism (in the case of America, although it is present elsewhere), strong criticism (to put it mildly) of Zionism and general Jewish influence in America, along with a strong “anti-woke” mentality that is vehemently anti-feminist, and so on. In essence, it is a right-wing movement with focal points highlighting these issues. Of course, it is more complex than this short definition would suggest, but this definition should be sufficient for now.

On the surface, I do not find the movement—at least insofar as it is defined above—objectionable. While I understand that speaking on Jewish issues is sensitive, I personally have no qualms about criticizing Israel; and if I peruse centuries and centuries of Catholic literature, I am equally undisturbed by criticisms of Jewish cultural influence in Christian society. Also, I hate feminism and all the “isms” that conflict with Catholicism. Furthermore, while I wouldn’t use the term “Nationalist” to describe myself—I would prefer “Patriot”—I do believe a healthy dose of love of country is good for any society.

In any event, despite any general agreements I may have with Groyper talking points, I do believe there are profound problems with the movement.

One important aspect is the fact that it is largely a movement of young males who would qualify as “Zoomers,” meaning those from Gen-Z (born between 1997-2012). The most well-known figure is, of course, Nick Fuentes, who did not invent the term but embraced it, and he is 27. While it is true that a movement filled with youth could be positive, it is also true that a youth-heavy movement will suffer from a lack of wisdom and perspective, which is only natural in a youth movement.

Now, I can see various Groypers reading this and becoming upset, perhaps brushing any criticisms off that I may have because I am not part of their generation. Well, if it helps, I am 37, which is not even a decade older than the oldest Zoomer; and I taught Zoomers for half a decade who would all be in their early-to-mid 20s now.

At any rate, the three main pitfalls that I see in the Groyper Movement are:

1. An oversimplified, if not erroneous, understanding of race.

2. A lack of decorum and virtue in public displays of Groyperism.

3. Resentment and antagonism at the heart of the movement.

In this article, I will focus on the first pitfall: the issue of race.

As far as race is concerned, the main issue with the general Groyper conversation about race is that they are often utterly wrong about how race has been understood historically. What I mean is that before Modernity, races of people were not separated by skin color but by tribe, regional differences, and so on.

For example, an Italian from 200 years ago would speak of the “French Race,” or the “English Race,” and that they shared a similar skin pigment was not enough to be considered of the same race. The word “race” comes to the English language from the Old French word rasse, which comes from the Italian word razza. The meaning of these words originally referred to family lineage, or, in a broader sense, to the clan someone was from.

So, an Englishman from 1600 could consider a Scotsman to be from a different race because he was from a different clan and family lineage. With the rise of Liberalism and Scientism in the 1800s, the word acquired a rationalist sense, and Evolutionists, specifically, began to apply it to people groups generally. Thus, we begin to hear of “white people” and “black people” as defining characteristics, rather than the more nuanced usage that was common.

Of course, this use of the term gained steam during the period of chattel slavery, and the momentum has never left us.

Furthermore, as Christendom continued to disintegrate, what it meant to belong to a people continued to change, which was accelerated by massive emigration. Historically, people stayed in one region for generations, and their belonging to a culture or people group had more to do with their identities as Catholics and their family history. As Protestantism and Liberalism became the dominant philosophies of the Anglosphere—and, by extension, America—the old, proper understanding of race disappeared. Now, when speaking of race, people have come to view it as a matter of skin color or DNA more broadly.

Within Groyperism, there is an acute understanding that mass immigration has led to severe societal consequences—because it has, at least in our day. However, it has not been the case historically that such immigration has produced deleterious results. If you are a North American and are proud of your history, be it Quebecois, New Englander, Hispanic, etc., then you would not have a history to be proud of if it were not for massive amounts of ancestors coming over from the Old Continent.

In any event, we can all agree that the present state of mass immigration has been a disaster. But the question is: Why has it been a disaster?

The Groyper answer would almost assuredly be because the immigration has been of predominantly non-white people. The notion of “white” identity is central to Groyperism. And it is a consistent theme in Groyper thinking that one of the main problems with America, and other nations historically consisting of an ethnically European majority, is a rise in non-white citizens.

On the surface, it is easy to understand why such an opinion makes sense, and it is possible to see the merit in this manner of thinking without having to throw around terms like “racist.” As human beings, we must use descriptive categories; and, visually, we can see that the general “white” culture is different than general Indian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures. And, since we would associate cultural, religious, and ethnical expressions with non-white cultures that are different, or even antithetical to the way of life we are used to in North America, it is understandable to see how an influx of people from such backgrounds is undesirable.

However, upon further consideration, the notion that the problems associated with other people groups have to do with race—DNA—is an untenable position for a Catholic. This is because genetic characteristics pertaining to skin pigmentation and other physiological traits carry no moral or spiritual weight. And the fabric of a civilization is not based on the color of skin or how people look but in how they believe, act, and so on.

Granted, having a preference for people who look like you for reasons of marriage, for example, is only natural; however, there is simply nothing about “being white” that is any better than being from some other race.

Read the Whole Article

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The ‘news’-media hide — not expose — the ultimate beneficiaries of the taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies that were the source and cause of the longest U.S. Government shut-down in history, and which subsidies congressional Republicans are now trying to redirect to their big donors.

First, the ‘news’-media’s lies (pretending that the beneficiaries were the people who purchased Obamacare insurance policies) will be reported and explained here; and, then, the truth will be reported, which was reported in an obscure place in a blog-post that still doesn’t yet have even a single reader-comment to it — so, it is very obscure indeed, but the evidences and the reasoning in that report make sense (though the author fails to link to its documentations) and are (unlike the newsmedia’s reports) relevant to answering this crucial question of whom the beneficiaries of Obamacare have been, which none of the ‘news’-media’s allegations about this matter do — nor even try to be relevant to identifying whom Obamacare’s ultimate beneficiaries have been.

A typical ‘news’-media’s report on this important question was headlined on November 16th in the Washington Post, “GOP plans to replace Obamacare have failed. Here’s what lawmakers propose now. Lawmakers are racing toward a mid-December deadline, with Republicans hoping to present side-by-side legislation with Democrats’ plan to extend ACA subsidies.” (”ACA” refers to the “Affordable Care Act,” which is Obamacare.) The key fact is that both of the Parties are controlled by America’s near-1,000 billionaires (who donate over half of all the money the Party receives), just like the nation’s press is; and, so, the pitch there (from congressional Republicans) is that whereas elected Democrats want the taxpayer-funded subsidies to remain in place, the Republicans want that money to go directly to ‘the people,” “the general public,” the “more than 20 million Americans [who] have benefited from [the] soon-to-expire ACA subsidies” — which merely ASSUMES that those individuals have been the ultimate recipients of these tax-funded subsidies, and also that each and every one of these 20 million is better-off because of Obamacare than they were prior to Obamacare (but congressional Republicans are saying that under THEIR plan, those people will be better-off receiving those subsidies directly) — but NEITHER of those assumptions is actually true. Obamacare just changed the arrangement of the deck-chairs on the Titanic.

The so-called factcheck dot org Website headlined on October 30th “Competing Claims on Who Benefits from ACA Subsidies” and was basically like those ‘news-reports are: presenting “competing claims,” instead of any intelligent analysis in order to find out whom the actual beneficiaries are.

And, finally, we come now to someone called Gary Levin (who is an M.D., trained in Ophthamology at GWU School of Medcine, and a retired professor at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine) and his “Digital Health Newsletter” blog at Linked-In, his October 9th post, “Who benefits from ACA subsidies?”, which is (unlike anything in the commercial or ‘non’-profit media), good enough for me to want to post it here in full; and, so, here it is:

Who benefits from ACA subsidies? Hint: It’s not patients, physicians, or taxpayers. Every subsidy dollar moves through a predictable chain of custody and every stop on that chain earns yield before a single claim is paid. Let’s follow the money! (1) UnitedHealth Group (UNH) The largest beneficiary of all. ACA subsidies → premium payments → float → investment income → Optum integration. They profit on the insurance side, the PBM side, and the provider side. Result: $500B market cap. Sold by lawmakers. Funded by your taxes. (2) Centene (CNC) The Medicaid king. Over 70% of its revenue comes directly from government contracts. ACA subsidies expand Medicaid → Centene gets paid per member per month. Wall Street calls this “predictable cash flow.” You call it “government dependence.” (3) Elevance (ANTM) Formerly Anthem. Biggest player on the ACA exchanges. Premium subsidies guarantee growth with zero innovation. They raise premiums, Treasury covers it, and everyone claps. (4) Humana (HUM) Specializes in Medicare Advantage — the same model, different subsidy. Every “expansion” of coverage means more taxpayer dollars into their reserves. They turn seniors into cap tables. (5) CVS Health (CVS) Not just pharmacies — they own the PBM (Caremark) and insurer (Aetna). The ACA drives prescription volume. More subsidies = more scripts = more rebate spread. They sell your medicine back to you at a markup the government pays for. (6) Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) Warren Buffett’s insurance empire (GEICO, Gen Re, Berkshire Re) feasts on subsidized premiums. Every ACA dollar increases the pool of insurable risk and investable float. Berkshire doesn’t need your premium, they need your patience. (7) JP Morgan Chase (JPM) The invisible hand behind all of it. Where do you think insurers park reserves and float? Billions in premium dollars sit in treasuries and funds until claims clear. Wall Street earns the spread; you pay the bill. (8) BlackRock & Vanguard They own the float and the firms. BlackRock is the top shareholder in every insurer on this list. Subsidies don’t create access, they create assets. And those assets are securitized, indexed, and reinvested back into the same cartel. (9) Consulting & Actuarial Firms McKinsey, Milliman, Deloitte — the architects of the labyrinth. Every tweak in subsidy policy means new contracts, new spreadsheets, new fees. It’s the business model. (10) Congress (both parties) They call it “coverage expansion.” What it really means is: guaranteed cash flow for their donors. Subsidies buy loyalty. Loyalty buys elections. And you, the taxpayer, foot the bill. So who benefits from ACA subsidies? The same people who benefit from everything else: The insurers who collect premiums. The financiers who invest the float. The asset managers who own the insurers. The politicians who collect their donations.

So, in other words, the Democratic and Republican Parties are two competing teams of billionaires, and they are in conflict over which team’s method of ripping off the American public on health care for the benefit of investors will prevail.

Unchanged after Obamacare went into effect, America continues having the highest per-person cost, and lowest-quality, healthcare of all industrialized countries, and so the healthcare corporations are very profitable but not only does the U.S. rank 50th on life-expectancy (longevity), but the public are being bankrupted by America’s uniquely high healthcare prices (very profitable for investors but bankrupting for many of the public) in order to be able to stay alive. So, this Governmental shut-down wasn’t a result of the public, or of what they want (which Obama had vaguely promised but didn’t even try to deliver, because it was inconsistent with what the billionaires want), but of the billionaires who fund the careers of the politicians (including both Parties) keeping their heist of the public going for high profits to investors. And that’s just one example of how this ‘democracy’ produces a very dissatisfied public.

This is what the billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media refuse to report; so, I do.

The most reliable single measure of the quality of a nation’s healthcare is the nation’s individuals’ life-expectancy. Almost all countries’ life-expectancies have been rising rather steadily after WW2, except during 2020 and 2021 (covid-19, during which they declined). America’s rose from 68.14 years in 1950, to 78.74 in 2012, and Obamacare took effect in 2013 and brought the percentage of uninsured Americans down from 14.5% then, to around 8% in 2017, when it has since remained at around 8%. However, unlike in the years before 2012 when American life-expectancies were continually rising, that rise abruptly stopped in 2014 at 78.84, and it’s now at 79.40 — a rise of only 0.56 years during this entire 11-year period — the period during which Obamacare has been available. There is no evidence that Obamacare has improved health care in this country, and the life-expectancies’ data show that when Obamacare started, America’s longevity-gains stopped — the result (stasis) was even worse than it had previously been (annual improvements). That’s not necessarily a cause-effect relationship, but it IS evidence that Obamacare did not improve American health care, and might even have hurt it.

Obama had lied about his healthcare plan while running for office, and then, once in office, he secretly and privately fought against the features of it that would lower its prices and its costs, and he worked secretly with the Republicans to block those features of his plan so as to protect the capital-gains returns to the healthcare-industry’s investors (including many billionaires, many of whom are megadonors to the Democratic Party), as a result of which, both the plan’s prices to consumers, and its costs to the federal Treasury, have been far higher than he promised and that was passed into law and delivered to the public in his Obamacare (or “Affordable Care Act”); and, so, congressional Democrats today have been refusing to accept the Republican Trump Administration’s eliminating the federal subsidies that keep Obamacare (the ‘Affordable Care Act’) going (funding those megadonors’ gravy train, upon which congressional Democrats depend). The Republicans have been trying to do this (prevent and now to stop this) ever since 2010 — even before the Act was passed into law. And, all the while, America continues having the highest per-person cost, and lowest-quality, healthcare of all industrialized countries, and so the healthcare corporations are very profitable here, but not only does the U.S. rank 50th on life-expectancy (longevity), but many of the public are being bankrupted by America’s uniquely high healthcare prices in order to be able to stay alive.

So, this Governmental shut-down wasn’t a result of the public, or of what they want (which Obama had promised), but of the billionaires who fund the careers of the politicians (including both Parties) keeping their heist of the public going for high profits to investors.

And that’s just one example of how this ‘democracy’ produces a very dissatisfied public. It isn’t any authentic democracy.

I have proposed a way to get the extreme corruptness that plagues our Government to end, and which would produce an authentic democacy — a Government that represents the public, instead of (like now) that represents only the Parties’ megadonors.

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post Who Ultimately Benefits From the Obamacare Subsidies? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Antisocial people run in packs.  They exert concentrated power, but they are decidedly in the minority.

Prosocial people operate individualistically, but in the aggregate, they have much-greater power.  Prosocial people can be defeated only by themselves.

Many familiar practices don’t utilize power effectively.  Some new practices also wouldn’t.

Use power effectively these 6 ways:

1. Worship, love, and save. 

Individual faith in Christ limits the envy that stymies economic growth.  Individual faith also strengthens lesser magistrates to limit greater magistrates, which secures individuals’ rights.

Love is disciplined action that builds healthy relationships.

Stocks provide the greatest long-term returns of any single class of investment.

Choosing stocks in normal times, but choosing gold instead in crisis times, provides even-greater long-term returns.  In normal times that include routine government-money-error cycles, stocks provide the greatest returns.  In crisis times, when money producers have been more greatly inflating the money quantity, and more greatly suppressing profits, gold shelters assets and provides better returns.

Saving builds productivity.

2. Choose assets, and consumer products, whose producers do the least harm.

Shopping for the best added value is the key ingredient that makes voluntary cooperation select for the producers that add the most value.  But this added value can give fund managers and corporate managers the power and control to pursue ends that harm everyone.

Individuals can limit such harms by moving their investments out of funds like those of BlackRock and Vanguard, by supporting government officials who limit government pension investments in such funds, and by considering corporate managers’ harmful actions when choosing products like those of Anheuser-Busch InBev, Target, and Disney.

3. Assess government people by how fully they use their constitutional powers against others in government and cronies. 

Government people are delegated powers through their jurisdictions’ charters.

Government people’s powers are strikingly asymmetric.  Government people have no lawful powers to defy the Constitution but awesome lawful powers and duties to support the Constitution.

If government people use their lawful powers to limit only themselves, we need supermajorities before this will secure our freedoms.  But if any government person also uses his lawful powers to limit others, then each single executive, bloc of legislators, or judge better secures our freedoms.

Many politicians have much to say about what other people should do and are eager to do other people’s jobs, but they don’t do their own jobs.

The only things politicians say or do that are worth supporting are actions to use constitutional powers to limit others in government and cronies.

4. Vote strategically for constitutionalists in Republican primaries and in general elections. 

Keep Republican Progressives from returning in subsequent elections as hard-to-dislodge incumbents.

Register as a Republican if needed to vote, and in primaries vote for the most constitutionalist Republicans.  In general elections, vote for the most constitutionalist candidates from any party.

If you build support, more will follow.

If a Progressive Democrat wins for the time being, others in the various branches and jurisdictions have the power and duty to undo any damage he might do.  Of these others, Republicans are the only people who might limit Progressive Democrats; and Republican Progressives don’t.

Wherever there’s unmitigated damage, Republican Progressives are the people we must hold accountable.

5. Support partial secessions of county regions from legacy state governments and of neighborhood regions from legacy city governments. 

The Constitution has a rule that the national government shall guarantee to each state ¾ really, to each state’s residents ¾ a republican form of government.  A given government can assuredly be republican only if its charter has the same rules and sanctions as the Constitution.

In state, county, and city charters, the ratifiers echo the Constitution’s design features but then layer on incompatible scope and administrative states.  No state constitutions delegate only limited, enumerated powers.

Just as state delegates ratified the Constitution in the USA, county delegates can ratify county-region constitutions within each state, and neighborhood delegates can ratify neighborhood-region constitutions within their cities.

Compared to when the USA seceded from Great Britain, this is simpler.  Now each region’s delegates can copy the Constitution.  Also, now these delegates will be implementing the explicit governing law ¾ the Constitution ¾ whereas the legacy states or cities clearly aren’t.

6. Support a good party. 

Our fundamental political and therefore economic problem in our system of two major parties is that both are majority Progressive.

If the economy is viewed as a process, then governments are impactful controls.  If governments are viewed as processes, then parties are the key controls.

Where the Constitution is designed to limit governments, party rules are designed to empower party organizations.  For a good party, like for a seceding county region or neighborhood region, the Constitution is a model design solution.  It’s ready-built and well examined.

The fundamental solution is to build at least one major party with a party constitution that limits the party’s power.  A good party will use a party constitution and complementary party laws to enact candidate selection processes that favor constitutionalist candidates.

We can build a good party any of multiple ways: elect a president who uses his constitutional powers, partially secede from state governments, start neighborhood voter information meetings, take control of the Republican Party.

Fail to fix at least one party, and no other solution will be sufficient — Not term limits, not other constitutional amendments.  Fix at least one party, and its people will make quick, lasting work of the remaining problems.

The more effectively that prosocial individuals use their powers, the more quickly that all people will live in increased freedom.

This article was originally published on American Thinker and was reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post 6 Hacks to a Better Government appeared first on LewRockwell.

Mike Benz shocked more than a few followers with his instantaneous reaction to the “just in time” B-2 bombing operation in the so-called “12 Day War.”  After each Israeli mass ejection, each sigmoidal burst of unstable energy, every solar flare, the world simply shrugs and moves on.

The squashing function used in machine learning is not dissimilar to the squashing function of our policy leadership, each minute categorizing every state action as all or nothing, this or that, rendering contemplation superfluous.

The current administration simultaneously ignores, and obsesses over, the numbers.  Six, seven (or is it eight?) “wars ended” by Trump, 20 or 28 point peace plans developed in secret, announced by the underboss, with the armed and menacing caporegime on stage, left and right.

Foreign and domestic policy made simple, after Washington first made it obscenely complicated.

We need peace in Gaza, and liberty for Palestine, but without decades of Washington’s seduction by and obedience to the Tel Aviv gang, there would be no grand apartheid nuclear racist state at all, no multigenerational gulags for Palestinians, no ability to call in the B-2s in the wee hours before Israel is pulverized by recurring spasms of regional rage.

We need simple dollar dominance or else, yet the real numbers that should alarm us flash like an urgent interstellar warning from Congressman Thomas Massie’s lapel pin.  We need stablecoin, the rogue state  urges, to ensure you get the dollar you deserve.  What royal bull is this? The recent “peaceful” engagement of the current administration has entailed not just empty promises of “investment” from Japan, Europe, Korea, China, Central Asia, compliant Arab emirates and kingdoms – but actual lies!  The amount of promised investment by these countries, most of them facing declining populations, economic and existential political crises in the near future, is beyond stratospheric, it is purely imaginary.

Unless of course, the expected value of the Queen Dollar, raped into a coma by the Federal Reserve goons since 1913, will alter as quickly as a sigma function can change a 49.9% probability to zero, and a 50.1% to a 1.

We need an end to almost four years of war and for someone – anyone – to put out the trillion dollar bonfire in Ukraine.  Yet it could have ended at any time – in the same negotiated terms as 2022, or 2025, or 2030 – by the US simply ending its fundamental support. Putin is the only current world leader who doesn’t speak in tongues, who says exactly what he is thinking, who tells the world exactly what he is doing, again and again.  Yet Trump “doesn’t understand him” and “can’t figure him out.”

The US, in a calculated short term play to firmly affix the European suckle on the US possum’s tit has encouraged, planned, and funded the US/NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, sacrificing Ukraine like a victim in low budget torture porn.  Having achieved the desired economic latch with a Europe in deep decline, other miscalculations by Washington and European fantasists mean that suddenly, the plot must wind down by Christmas.  We will walk out of the theater arm-in-arm, well satisfied.

Consciously ignoring the realist visionaries, like John Mearsheimer, US foreign policy is a chaotic mix of Mahan’s Rimland, Mackinder’s Heartland, and Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard – all approaches ginned up in the 20th century, and phenomenally outdated today.  Hence we have a navy “patrolling the seas” by design with only four, and sometimes three, carrier battle groups mission-ready at any given moment; we have an air force that was last century’s logistics juggernaut, and this century’s expensive and unserviceable white elephant; the army is a mismanaged husk of men, women, and contractors, and the American President conducts his “wars” via special forces, expensive contracts, and the CIA. The future is nuclear, it is AI, and it is liberty whether we are ready or not – and the only lesson the state can derive from this reality is that it must increase nuclear weapon capability and creativity, leverage AI in equal measures for global propaganda and warfighting, and fearfully crush real freedom whenever it is noticed, wherever it is found.

The old Hollywood plot-lines, the shaping narratives, the predictive programming are now quickly discovered, and quickly categorized.  Benz’s video, blasted to millions minutes after the B2’s left Iran, bears this out.  Similarly, on September 10th, the widely unbelieved Netanyahu denial that he killed Charlie Kirk, broadcast before most of the world even knew Charlie Kirk was dead, also bears this out.  Americans are increasingly aware that a 20th and 21st century river of state-sponsored false flags leading inevitably to war, contagion, addiction, and poverty – in a word, US-led global statism – is real, true, and verifiable.  Our brains run their own version of the sigmoid calculation, by evolutionary design, and many are figuring it out, faster and faster, exponentially absorbing the information all around us and deciding thumbs up, or thumbs down.

Top Gun Maverick is how Washington wants its agenda and performance to be seen, accepted, and cheered.  Any number of Hollywood productions provide the same pro-state picture, blessing those who serve the state, or through the state serve their “communities” or enforce the “law.” Naturally, we get a good dose of villains within the state who are miraculously rooted out and face “justice” at the end of the episode.

Notwithstanding the strange predictive power of South Park, Hollywood is most honest and true with its investment in gore, torture porn, and zombies. No doubt what Americans watch on screen – the normalization of pointless violence – has been played out 100% in US foreign policy during the same era.  Horror and insanity drives the fundamentals of the US Department of War, as well as the fundamentals of the Federal Reserve.  The capos of the American government hold out Trump’s various “peace” agreements like a Hollywood franchise, counting the sequels, audiences briefly – if at all – reflecting on the fear, the expense, the gore, the nihilism.

The relief at the end of the movie – where the sympathetic nervous system had been fight or flight for an exciting hour – is the parasympathetic reward of passivity, relaxation, satisfaction.  Just what the State ordered, as it conducts real murder, torture, unimaginable destruction of life and liberty, generation of creative ways to survive or die, new ways to be alienated.

The superficial declarations of peace plans, devised by avaricious and evil states, are little more than this month’s required upgrade in an engineered and long-term protection racket.  For Gaza and the West Bank, the plot is accept the torture and genocide, the rape of your land, the erasure of your people – because it will continue unabated. For Ukraine, it is a similar message:  You were America’s fool, and its fool you will remain. Enjoy the show!

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According to the most recent data, the birth rate in the United States hit a new low in 2024. Many pundits and economists across the political spectrum have framed this as a big problem, not least of all because regime supporters want more young taxpayers to prop up social-benefit programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Among both leftists and conservatives, it has become popular to insist that a few tweaks to economic policy will reverse the downward trend in fertility.

For example, conservatives in recent years have pushed for a new federal program providing paid parental leave. On the Left, activists have repeatedly claimed that more healthcare spending on children and families will increase fertility rates. Both sides have claimed that new policies designed to reduce housing costs will increase the fertility rate. The idea here is that net spending power will lead to more children.

On the surface, it makes a lot of sense to assume that more net income makes child rearing cheaper—and consequently more people will have children. Unfortunately for this idea, experience in recent decades suggests there is actually a relatively weak connection between rising incomes and birth rates. That is, it is increasingly clear that the phenomenon of falling birth rates is due to factors that are apparently far beyond the mere cost of living. Moreover, deliberate efforts to create state-funded benefits for childrearing activities have failed to increase fertility rates.

Can More Family-Targeted Welfare Increase the Fertility Rate? 

It has become popular among pro-fertility activists to say that government policies favoring increased benefits for parental leave, childcare, and childrearing will increase fertility. But where has this been demonstrated? It certainly has not been demonstrated in modern European welfare states.

For example, advocates for parental leave like to point to the proliferation of paid family-leave programs in Europe. Some advocates even claim that these policies make family life more affordable, and therefore good for fertility rates. Even if that’s true, it is apparent that paid family leave programs can’t be shown to increase fertility rates on their own. After all, most of the countries boasting of paid family leave programs have fertility rates below that of the United States, and all these countries have followed similar downward trajectories in fertility over more than fifty years.

A specific case that we might point to is Sweden where we have long been told that the welfare state favors generous spending on child care and early-childhood education. This, we are told, reduces the cost of childrearing. Again, the policy does not appear to work, and the Swedish fertility rate continues to fall:

The fact that it is easy to combine children with employment thanks to generous systems for parental leave and childcare is assumed to make more people inclined to actually have children. … But as there have been no significant changes in family policy, this does not explain the downturn we now see.

 But how about in eastern Europe? Conservatives like to quote family-friendly statements from Hungarian politicians who state that they’d like to support more childrearing with government policy. Since 2010, social conservative Viktor Orbán has overseen the implementation of a variety of ostensible pro-child policies such as tax credits for families with children. Women who have more than two children never pay income tax. This appeared to work for several years after 2010, but since 2021, the birth rate has fallen again from 1.61 in  2021 to 1.38 in 2024.

The overall trend in down across many countries. Source: Our World in Data.

Meanwhile, in Poland, the state has recently implemented similar tax bonuses designed to increase fertility. Overall economic trends suggest this won’t turn the tide. After all, since the end of the Cold War, Poland has been one of the world’s great economic success stories, and since 1990 “GDP per capita in Poland has risen eightfold, even adjusting for the cost of living. Since 2002, unemployment has fallen from 20% to 2.8%.”

Yet, in Poland, the fertility rate has now fallen to 1.1, making Poland one of the least fertile countries in the world.

Are we really to believe that some tax credits will succeed at doing what an eight-fold increase in income could not do?

A similar trend exists in Hungary, by the way, where real GDP per capita has risen by 40 percent since 2012, yet the fertility rate is still below where it was during the bad old days of the Cold War.

Further evidence of a weak link between fertility and economic prosperity is found in a new NBER working paper released by Claudia Goldin.1

Goldin notes that fertility in the United States fell throughout most of the nineteenth century, just as standards of living were increasing substantially. Moreover, the decline continued into the first forty years of the twentieth century, with a trend solidly in place well before the Great Depression.

Nearly 200 years of falling fertility. Source: Statista. 

When most Americans comment on fertility rates, however, they tend to look only to post-1945 rates, and to look at falling fertility since the 1950s. Yet, as Goldin correctly points out, the “Baby Boom was an astonishing turnaround from the low birthrates of the 1920s and the Great Depression.” That is, the rising fertility of the early 1950s was very much a departure from the long-term trend.

Source: Our World in Data.

The US is not alone in this trend, the so-called “fertility transition.” In France, according to some research, the transition occurred “at the latest in 1827 (other data suggests the transition happened at least two decades earlier).”2

Life was hard in the nineteenth century, of course, and the indisputable fruits of industrialization were felt only gradually, even if solid gains in income and standards of living were being made almost constantly. Nonetheless, we find that as income increased, fertility actually went down.

Moreover, we find there is little connection between fertility and anything we might call “objective” living standards. For example, the standard of living is objectively much higher today than it was during the 1920s, or even the 1970s. Cars are safer, homes are larger, food requires a smaller share of income, and clothing is much, much less expensive. Virtually no one’s great-grand parents would look at modern life and think that the standard of living was higher 50 years ago or 90 years ago. Yet, many potential parents state that they can’t have children now because it’s too difficult to maintain an acceptable standard of living. Obviously, subjective standards of what constitutes an acceptable standard of living has changed substantially from what our grandparents thought.

We find here a similar trend to what we see in Poland. Although the standard of living in Poland is clearly far above what it was in Cold War times, fertility rates continue to fall.

This clear trend then, has led one economist to recently note:

There’s lots of explanations that people have put forward in terms of why the birth rate is falling in the United States. For the most part, a lot of them aren’t particularly successful … So people talk about things like higher costs of having a family—of raising children, housing, and child care. It turns out those don’t work very well as explanations.

So, if mere income levels and economic trends don’t provide definitive explanations of fertility, what does?

Researchers offer a wide variety of explanations from ideology to education levels. These are all debated, but the whole discussion is a helpful reminder that human action is not a product of a mechanical relationship between income levels and the cost of some good or activity. What human beings value can change substantially over time for reasons far more complex than “the price of thing X went down, so I will therefore buy more of thing X.” If having children is “thing X” in this equation, it is clear that there is much more to the matter than the cost of feeding and clothing and housing children.

—

1 Claudia Goldin, “The Downside of Fertility,” in NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 34268, http://www.nber.org/papers/w34268.

2 See Blanc, G., & Wacziarg, R. (2018). Change and persistence in the age of modernization: Saint-Germain-d’Anxure, 1730–1895.; Spolaore, E., & Wacziarg, R. (2014). Fertility and modernity.; Spolaore, E., & Wacziarg, R. (2009). The diffusion of development. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124(2), 469–529.

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Did LBJ Kill JFK? The Shocking Plot They Tried to Hide

Did Lyndon B. Johnson have John F. Kennedy assassinated? In this explosive episode of America’s Untold Stories, Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley dig deep into the controversial theory that JFK’s own Vice President — the man who became President the moment Kennedy died — was at the center of the Dallas conspiracy.

Most political figures are killed by their successors. And only one man had the means, motive, and opportunity to remove Kennedy: Lyndon B. Johnson.

We’ll explore LBJ’s Texas political machine, his ties to defense contractors and Big Oil, and the historical clues that have convinced some researchers that Dallas was a coup, not a tragedy.

For further reading on LBJ (Affiliate Links):

LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination → https://amzn.to/3JjbSqR

The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 1) → https://amzn.to/3rFvZtg Means of Ascent (Vol. 2) → https://amzn.to/3rPGGKd

Master of the Senate (Vol. 3) → https://amzn.to/3svx46m

The Passage of Power (Vol. 4) → https://amzn.to/3JdtPXQ

️‍️ Watch now and judge for yourself: coincidence… or conspiracy?

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Thanks, John Smith.

AP News

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Click here:

John Leake

The post The Washington Post’s Feeble Response to CDC Autism Update appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Brian Dunaway.

Ben Bartee

The post The ‘But Aluminum in Tea’ Vaxx Industry Lie, Debunked appeared first on LewRockwell.

The AI Bubble is a perfect example of why The Fed should not exist. Give human beings the ability to counterfeit money and their delusions of grandeur are going to follow. Economic laws become a relic of the past. The free will of every single person on earth is ignored as if it doesn’t exist. The receivers of The Fed’s counterfeit money believe that they will overcome it all, and reality will conform to their imaginations. End the Fed.

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