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Ben Bartee

The post Tulsi vs. The Duopolistic Blob: Senate Showdown Notes appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Haaretz.com 

The post Hasbara Hitch: Pro-Israel Social Media Bot Goes Rogue, Calls IDF Soldiers ‘White Colonizers in Apartheid Israel’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Bruce McLane.

The post Whitney Webb Triggers Weinstein Tantrum With Facts About Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Jacob Hornberger, founder of Future of Freedom Foundation, is skeptical that the long awaited records on the JFK assassination will finally be declassified and released. Hornberger points out that the EO Trump signed did not call for the actual release of those documents (and those related to the RFK and MLK assassinations) but called for a plan to release the documents. Hornberger expects the CIA to once again push back against this and that any released information will not contain any smoking gun, but he hopes he is wrong. 

The post Skepticism on JFK Assassination-Related Records Release appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin. 

The post How the Bishop Who Scolded Trump Enabled Gaza Genocide appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Frahm.

Gateway Pundit

The post Legacy Media Caught Peddling More Fake News appeared first on LewRockwell.

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Jon Fleetwood

Monkeypox Outbreak Occurs After Moderna Begins Testing Monkeypox mRNA Shot in U.K. Clinical Trial

The post 147 Million Poultry Slaughtered Since 2022—Culled appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff

The post How to handle vermin appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

Daily Mail

The post Secret depravity of the Davos global elite appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Andy Thomas.

Science, Public Health Policy and the Law

The post Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com Original

The post A Republic of Spies appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

In Memory of Nawar al-Awlaki, Age 8.

CounterPunch.org

The post In Memory of Nawar al-Awlaki, Age 8 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

Biden gave these cluster bombs to Zelensky in Ukraine, but this bombing happened on Trump’s watch. Trump needs to do something about this. If he doesn’t, it means that Trump condones it. This is one of the traps set for Trump by the outgoing Biden regime.

US Cluster Bombs Target Civilians in Ukraine War Zone US Tax Payer War Crime by Patrick Lancaster

Read on Substack

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John Leake

The post The Biodefense Oligarchy and Its Demographic Defeats appeared first on LewRockwell.

The left has good reason to be very afraid of this quick-witted quartet.

by Tim Donner

Once upon a time, Senate scrutiny of a president’s Cabinet appointments was essentially pro forma. The advice and consent of the upper chamber of Congress was necessary, but despite whether the incoming president was a Republican or Democrat, it was largely a formality. Senators from both parties mostly agreed with the basic premise that a president deserves to surround himself with whomever he desires. But that was in normal times. And as we well know, the second Trump presidency, like the first, is anything but normal.

A trip to the time capsule reveals that the only Cabinet nominee in the last 40 years to be rejected by the Senate was George H.W. Bush’s choice for secretary of Defense, John Tower, in 1989. All but one of Bush 41’s other nominees received unanimous approval. More recently, the Cabinets of three consecutive two-term presidents – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama – sailed right through. Only one of Clinton’s nominees received more than two votes in opposition. Only Bush 43’s three attorney generals and two other nominees got more than two downvotes. Things were not quite as smooth for Obama, but only five of his nominees over two terms exceeded 30 opposing votes. Many of those three presidents’ selections over 24 years were approved by voice vote.

Things began to change in 2017, but even then, the only Trump nominee to come close to being rejected was Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who eked out approval 51-50. Five other Trump nominees received 40 or more votes in opposition but gained approval by margins of no less than five votes. After the GOP’s bitter, disputed loss of the presidency and both chambers of Congress in 2020, Republican opposition was tame compared to what we are witnessing with Trump’s second-term Cabinet.

Republicans joined Democrats in approving the nomination of Washington insider Lloyd Austin as Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense by a vote of 93-2. Even Biden nominees who would later become ripe subjects for Republican wrath, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, were easily approved, Garland by a 70-30 margin and Buttigieg by 86-13. And Antony Blinken, who rounded up those infamous 51 spies to claim the Hunter Biden laptop was likely the product of a Russian hack, was approved as secretary of State 78-22. The only Biden nominees who came close to being rejected were HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Jared Bernstein, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, both approved by 50-49 margins.

That brings us to the present day and four of the most controversial cabinet nominees in our lifetime: Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. This whip-smart quartet represents the sum of everything Democrats fear in the second Trump era: shockingly disruptive and virulently anti-establishment. Hegseth barely snuck through as secretary of Defense by the thinnest of margins, 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. The other three are likely headed for confirmation in the coming days – and there is nothing Democrats can do to stop them beyond hoping more than three Republican senators break ranks. With the GOP holding a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber, hectoring, lecturing, and assailing these nominees, as Democrats have done in recent days, will amount to little more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.

On top of Trump’s seemingly countless executive orders on everything from the southern border to the Panama Canal, this is the clearest evidence yet of how different the second Trump presidency is from the first when Trump was a novice forced to settle largely for DC insiders. And Democrats have ample reason to fear the disruption sure to be wrought by this foursome.

As Defense secretary, Hegseth will re-instill the “warrior spirit” in a military depressed by the DOD’s obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) during the Biden years. As the prospective director of National Intelligence and FBI director, respectively, Gabbard and Patel have made crystal clear their commitment to cleaning house, ridding their departments of flagrant bias and the weaponization of justice and intelligence that marked the last four years of Democratic rule. Kennedy’s singular mission is to “make America healthy again,” vital for a nation suffering from record levels of preventable disease. His is an exceedingly consequential initiative but one that was barely on the radar of previous administrations. Nevertheless, RFK Jr. is particularly galling to Democrats who see him as a turncoat, a traitor to the legendary liberal legacy of his family. They are utterly appalled by his refusal to unquestioningly agree with their conventional wisdom, particularly as it relates to their controlling, heavy-handed approach to vaccines.

Elections do indeed have consequences. And in the case of Donald Trump, the contrast between his Cabinet and the one that would have been assembled by Kamala Harris could hardly be more striking. After spending the entirety of the last decade attempting to bring down their reviled enemy by any means available, the left is now reaping the whirlwind in the form of not just the 47th president but the like-minded warriors who will surround him for the next four years.

The post Pete, Tulsi, Kash, and RFK: The Sum of All Democratic Fears appeared first on LewRockwell.

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John Leake

The post One Day Before Collision, Near Miss with Helicopter on Reagan Final Approach appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” —Gospel of Matthew 5:3-12

Last March, at a hospital in the small city of Hudson in upstate New York near where I live, I was checking in to have some bloodwork done as part of an elusive search to get at the root cause of a possible neurological condition. I was sitting on one side of a row of desks and a nurse was sitting across from me, tapping away at a computer keyboard to record my answers to her questions.

The hospital stands high on a hill on a choice chunk of real estate with a view to the west toward the Hudson River in the distance and the rolling, rounded shoulders of the Catskill Mountain range beyond. The hospital architects had taken advantage of this position and designed the building with large windows on the western side so you could see all of this natural splendor that often makes me think of the 19th-century Hudson River School of art. Among the school’s most renowned practitioners were Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole, whose homes and studios stand today as museums little more than a stone’s throw from where I was sitting.

It was sunny outside with a few fluffy, scattered clouds that looked like real clouds, not the gauzy products of chemtrails with which the skies of this area are regularly sprayed. I was grateful for that. I wanted to be in a good mood. I don’t like hospitals or needles—or suspicious-looking clouds.

At one point in her line of questioning, the nurse asked me, from a list of possibilities, what my religious affiliation was. The question took me by surprise. When the nurse recited the final choice of “none,” I repeated “none.” I said it without really thinking about it. Click went the keyboard. I was surprised by the question. Was a simple blood draw capable of putting me in such a state that I’d need last rites?

As the nurse asked me several more questions and as I sometimes glanced out the wall of glass at the vast expanse of beauty outside, I thought about what I’d just done. We are at war, I thought. And, as the saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes, I thought. And I thought I’d better come clean and do whatever I could to get right with God right then and there and not waver for another second longer. For who knows when or where or how the evil ones in high places will strike next? Or how bad it will be? The presidential election was still months away and there was no telling then what was going to happen between then and November or how the election was going to play out, if the grotesque nightmare we’ve been living under since the stolen 2020 election was going to continue for yet another four years—or not.

That first, automatic response of mine had little to do with any irresolution on my part. I said “none” because I thought that my religious affiliation was no one’s business but my own. But then I thought, no. Why hide anything about that? What was I afraid of? I remembered Jesus telling his followers early in his ministry about how no one lights a lamp and then covers it up; you put it on a lampstand and it gives light to all of the house. In the same way, he said, let your light shine before others. And I also thought of one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter, denying that he ever knew Jesus as Jesus was being tortured in the hours before his execution. I do not, I thought, want to be that guy.

“Can we go back and change my religious affiliation?” I asked.

“Sure,” the nurse said.

“Make it Christian.”

She nodded, clicked on the keyboard. And there it was, on my official medical record. There was no priest to witness this unexpected turn of events. No baptism. No holy water. No visible water of any sort anywhere except in the slow-moving Hudson River maybe a mile away and in a nearly empty water cooler by the door. No confession of sins. No recital of the Nicene Creed. The heavens did not open. I saw no angels or doves. It was all just between me and the nurse. And God.

***

Jesus was not a Christian, of course. He was Jewish. And, of course, no one was called a “Christian” in the earliest days of what we call Christianity today. Those who came to follow Jesus were Jewish men and women who felt disenfranchised and subjugated by both their corrupt religious overlords—the Sadducees and the Pharisees—and the Roman occupiers of Palestine.

They came to believe Jesus knew something important about life (and death) that they did not, and he made no bones about it. They were drawn to him at first because of his miraculous healings of “every disease and every sickness among the people” (Matthew 4:23). And while those healings continued, what ultimately drew people to him were the words he spoke. Because he spoke his mind. And because he spoke to a transcendent reality that is always with us and toward which, through thick and thin, we can always aspire. We know this today because we have written records from eyewitnesses of some of the things he said back then, some of which are collected in the New Testament. We can see for ourselves that Jesus did not mince words.

And, to be sure, his followers must have found solace and support in his words. Jesus had no intention of creating a new religion or a church. He wanted to put people in touch with a sense of their own divinity and the holiness of their existence in the eyes of God without the intercessions of legalistic customs and insignificant rules, as had been the order of the day.

I imagine that being in his presence must have felt like a breath of fresh air. He spoke of forgiveness, compassion, respect, and love—the higher ideals of human behavior to which we can aim for to lead a more perfected life. He must have made people feel seen and understood, inviting them into a new community of both transcendence and belonging as opposed to the harsh realities with which they felt at odds, out of place, and hounded.

The healing of the lepers; the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee; the casting out of demons; the parables; the feeding of the thousands; the walking on water; the transfiguration; the cleansing of the temple; the betrayal by Judas; the so-called Last Supper; Jesus’ trial; crucifixion, death, resurrection; and the unstoppable movement of the long-suffering Jewish people that emerged as a result—all of that which we read about in the Gospel of Matthew—would come much later. But what really drew people to Jesus while he was alive was what he said and how he said it—with courage and conviction. He apparently feared nothing and no one but God. And he showed others how to be the same. As we might say today, what’s not to like? He was a superstar.

***

Among his words are what we now call the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is the first of five of what are known as the “great discourses” in the Gospel of Matthew (which most sources say was composed between 80 and 90 C.E.). And the opening lines of the sermon are what we now call the Beatitudes, of which there are nine in the Gospel of Matthew. In this gospel, the Beatitudes appear as his first teaching. And the Beatitudes were also revealing something new to which people were also drawn. It was what I learned in seminary to call the “transvaluation of suffering.”

This message stood over and against the way the world was or was perceived to be. Jesus spoke to the pain of spiritual poverty, of grief, and of persecution—and said that if you suffered under any of these conditions you were blessed. And you were blessed because in your suffering you were offered the unconditional promise of salvation, not just in the world to come, but in this life—here and now. It was, as far as we know, the first time anyone had spoken publicly in such a manner.

“And beyond this, silence reigns—doubtless a strategy of self-defense in view of their absolute powerlessness politically, a strategy also adopted later by the rabbis,” writes Hans Dieter Betz in his 1985 book, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount. “Despite such conditions, it is noteworthy that the SM [Sermon on the Mount] betrays no sign of defeatism, despair, or apocalyptic panic.” What’s more, Betz writes, the community who heard and lived by the ideals Jesus spoke of in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount “lived in unbroken confidence that it would endure and prevail against the storms of history and the hardships of human life. Seen in this way, the SM can almost be called a ‘manual for survival.’”

During the first several months of the COVID-19 psyop, many of us felt like we were being forced into silence. I remember when nothing I wrote in social media or said in person to my newly captured old friends and colleagues about what we were truly up against could get through to them. Worse, I was sometimes attacked for being a “conspiracy theorist.” It was beyond frustrating; it was ominous. What had happened to all of them? I wondered—and still wonder. Among the swarms of the willing, the compliant, and the villainous jab devotees, I felt like an army of one in a battle to bring those I know and love back from their insanity. And it was a battle I was losing.

At that point, the only way onward, for me, was inward. I will not say that I surrendered but I can say that I retreated. I did so to rearrange much of my life in ways I had never anticipated I would have to do. But I reconciled myself with the conclusion that this is what happens when you are living in a nation at war and you are among the small resistance. This involved finding new friends where I live—even when the government mandated us not to gather—and connecting to new people on social media—people who saw what I saw, believed what I believed. Who knew, in short, that what we were up against was not good, far from it. I also changed my mind about what I liked to read. And last year, I started writing this column, based on the new things I was reading, and now I can also include in my emergent community the subscribers to Underlined Sentences, for whom I am profoundly grateful.

Biblical scholars quibble over the sources of the Beatitudes and speculate as to whether Jesus actually said them in the order in which they appear in the gospels of Matthew (Matthew 5:3-12) and Luke (6:20-23), where they are part of what is known as the Sermon on the Plain (this sermon does not appear in the gospels or Mark or John), or if they were put there by the writers of these gospels to compose a cohesive whole. There is, however, enough agreement that the Beatitudes are rooted in Jesus’ ministry, represent his teaching faithfully, and exemplify what would become a venerable Christian tradition.

Taking on an analysis of any passage in the Bible is a daunting task. There are libraries of hefty tomes and entire lives of Biblical scholars dedicated to the critical examination of every word in the Bible. What I want to do in this essay is to offer a glimpse into how I believe the Jesus movement began. I have chosen the Beatitudes as a window into the entire Jesus movement, because the unconditional salvation spoken of in the Beatitudes epitomized Jesus’ “good news” of God’s deliverance. I don’t want to get into the weeds and “unpack” the text, as it was said of exegetical examinations when I was a seminarian. Rather, I want to unpack—very briefly—the time in which Jesus spoke these words and explore why they appealed to certain people at the time of Jesus’ earthly life.

I also want explore some striking similarities between that time and the times we’ve been living in the past five years. Because I have found—and some of my awakened friends have found—that among the many writers we follow on Substack, as well as people who host video interviews and writers of other blogs we follow, either seem to be revealing their Christian leanings little by little or have confessed outright, loudly, and proudly their conversion to the faith. I am including myself among them. And we’ve all wondered why this is and why now?

***

The Jewish men and women of Jesus’ day would have generally understood salvation as both material and national prosperity. We read in The Anchor Bible Dictionary: “Salvation involves being delivered from slavery (Deut 24:18), separation from one’s family, and the threat of death. It means victory in battle, the freedom to marry, the gift of descendants, a long life, and the protection needed to enjoy one’s rightful patrimony.”

True, there is a spiritual, other-worldly dimension to Jewish salvation, especially in the Jewish apocalyptic teachings. But it is not akin to what Jesus uniquely espoused in the Beatitudes. This was that new thing. We read in the Life Application Study Bible:

“With Jesus’ announcement that the kingdom was near (4:17), people were naturally asking, ‘How do I qualify to be in God’s kingdom?’ Jesus said that God’s kingdom is organized differently from worldly kingdoms. In the kingdom of heaven, wealth and power and authority are unimportant. Kingdom people seek different blessings and benefits, and they have different attitudes.”

The Oxford Companion to the Bible tells us that the Beatitudes speak to “those who stand before God empty-handed, vulnerable, seeking a right relationship with him and others, open to receive and express his mercy and forgiveness with integrity, ready to experience and to establish peace.”

Jesus’ kingdom is not just another place in time and space; Jesus’ kingdom is in this world. This is also what distinguishes Jesus from Judaism. This is a dual feature that emerged early in Jesus’ ministry. Robert Guelich, in his 1982 book, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding, writes: “In Jesus’ person and ministry the good news about God’s promise-fulfilling, redemptive activity is announced.” We read in the old English translation of the Geneva Bible of the Gospel of Luke that Jesus tells the Pharisees that “the kingdome of God is within you” (17:21).

Ultimately, the growth and success of the Jesus movement, even before the existence of any written documents, was not going to depend on any of the prevailing traditions of the day—wisdom, prophecy, miracle-healer, wonder-worker. The growth and success of the movement was going to depend upon building communities around the idea that suffering is a good thing. For what greater (and timeless) suffering is there than when the individual is pitted against the state? This struggle is the signature of aligning our personal will with the will of God, and of this we can ask for no higher a calling. “If my heart is in accord with God’s heart, I am blessed, and I can experience the great peace, even in the midst of suffering,” writes John S. Dunne in his 2000 book, Reading the Gospel.

***

In the Gospel of Matthew there’s an episode in which Jesus retreats to the desert, where he is tempted by the devil. The devil tempts him three times. In the last temptation, the devil takes Jesus to a high mountain—perhaps replicating Moses’ climb up Mount Sinai where he encounters God—and shows him all the kingdoms of the world. There, perhaps with a sweep of his hand, the devil tells Jesus that all of it would be his if he fell down and worshipped the devil. Jesus tells the devil to worship and serve “the Lord your God,” whereupon the devil fled.

Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher and lay theologian, in his 1991 book, Anarchy and Christianity, offers this exposition on the meaning of that exchange:

“Jesus does not say to the devil: It is not true. You do not have power over kingdoms and states. He does not dispute this claim. He refuses the offer of power because the devil demands that he should fall down before him and worship him…. We may thus say that among Jesus’ immediate followers and in the first Christian generation, political authorities—what we call the state—belonged to the devil and those who held power received it from him.”

The four canonical gospels that we have today in the New Testament were so intentionally written and designed that it can likely be no accident that in the Gospel of Matthew, right after this confrontation with the devil, was when Jesus began his ministry by teaching, preaching, and healing to both Jews and Gentiles alike. It is as if out in the desert with the devil he’d had his ultimate trial—a come-to-Jesus moment, if you will—from which he came away enlightened and enthused to share with others what he’d learned from his own agonizing personal experience—the one way to learn that nobody can refute or fact check.

At first, he spoke in synagogues, where he preached the gospel, the good news—that the kingdom of heaven has come, that God is with us and that he cares for us. “Enormous crowds were following Jesus—he was the talk of the town, and everyone wanted to see him,” we read in the Life Application Study Bible. “The disciples, who were the closest associates of this popular man, were certainly tempted to feel important, proud, and possessive. Being with Jesus gave them not only prestige, but also opportunity for receiving money and power.”

This was when Jesus pulled his disciples aside—at this point it was just Peter, Andrew, James, and John (a crowd might have gathered later because at the end of his sermon in the Gospel of Matthew (7:28) we’re told that the crowds were “astounded at his teaching”)—to have a talk with them as if to warn them not to feel too important about themselves and let their teacher’s popularity get to their heads. When Jesus was alone with these disciples, they gathered on a hillside near Capernaum for a private audience with their beloved teacher. There, in a kind of initiation, he delivered his Sermon on the Mount (some say this occurred over several days) and spoke those now-renowned words that make up the Beatitudes. I find it hard to imagine that these four men who’d left behind their domestic lives and livelihoods as fishermen that this message was anything close to “good news,” that this was what they had signed up for.

The Life Application Study Bible again:

“Jesus began his sermon with words that seem to contradict each other. But God’s way of living usually contradicts the world’s. If you want to live for God you must be ready to say and do what seems strange to the world. You must be willing to give when others take, to love when others hate, to help when others abuse. By giving up your own rights in order to serve others, you will one day receive everything God has in store for you….

“Each beatitude tells how to be blessed. ‘Blessed’ means more than happiness. It implies the fortunate or enviable state of those who are in God’s kingdom. The Beatitudes don’t promise laughter, pleasure, or earthly prosperity. To Jesus, ‘blessed’ means the experience of hope and joy, independent of outward circumstances.”

What’s also particularly striking about this movement is that the oppressive environment in which Jesus lived and taught brought on what the rulers of the day could not have anticipated. Individuals were thrown back upon themselves to reconsider the world in which they lived, the traditions in which they were formed and raised. History tells us that back then there were people who felt so squeezed and traumatized that Jesus’ appearance in their lives forced them to question the old and established ways of being and to form something new and apart from the everything they’d believed in before. What they all had in common was the idea that the world was not right.

Although I don’t want to dissect any words or phrases in the Beatitudes, I will say this: much depends on translation and historical context. For example, the terms “the meek” or “the poor” refer “to those who stand empty-handed before God in total dependence upon him,” writes Guelich. “The term in no way connotes weakness or softness, an attitude rather than a condition.” I think of it as having the strength of a willow tree, to bend and not break, in the storms waged against us.

Then and now, the best way to understand religion and society is to see religion in terms of two different functions: religion can support the order of things or it can serve as an ideological fortress to stand up against the status quo. Religion is either a state-sanctioned movement or it is “other.” The early Christians associated themselves with the latter. And this is what would eventually get them into a lot of trouble.

I’m coming around to thinking that we’ve found ourselves in a similar situation these 2,000 years later. Over the past five years, many of us had become the unwitting heirs of this “other” movement and have likewise found ourselves getting into a lot of trouble with the ruling cabal who wanted us to shut up by censoring us in all forms of media, and goading us to just go away.

Curiously, it was not so much the religion of those in the Jesus movement that threatened the rulers back then. From its earliest days under the Roman empire, the movement was seen not as a religious problem but a political one. Jesus began preaching and teaching and healing in public, but the movement would later be forced underground, to meet in private homes and even in catacombs of the dead. And it was this that disturbed the authorities. It was the movement’s meeting in private and the authority’s inability to control them. And I don’t believe it is much of a stretch to say that much the same can be said of many of us in the past five years, particularly in the early days of the COVID-19 psyop.

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More good news from the front lines – in the war against the pushing of devices.

VW has just announced it won’t be bringing one of its newest devices – the ID 7 sedan – to the United States. On account of “changing market conditions,” by which is meant there’s not much of a market for devices – and because of the changes ushered in with the ushering out of the Biden regime.

The new Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, has “directed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to reconsider rules covering the 2022 model year through the 2031 model year for cars and trucks. The agency in June said it would hike Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirements to about 50.4 miles per gallon by 2031 from 39.1 mpg currently for light-duty vehicles,” according to a report published by Automotive News.

The headline of the Automotive News article reads: “Newly confirmed U.S. Transportation chief moves to repeal Biden vehicle fuel economy standards.”

Elections apparently do matter.

The 2020 election – if you want to call it that – brought us Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the outgoing secretary of transportation. That brought us a near-doubling of federal CAFE “standards” – as these edicts are styled. They are not optional suggestions. Vehicle manufacturers are forced to comply with them. And the only way to comply with a 50.4 MPG CAFE requirement is to manufacture lots of devices – i.e., electric vehicles such as the ID 7.

This “works” to create an “incentive” to manufacturer devices. Not a mandate, per se. So President Trump hasn’t got it quite right when he talks about ending the “EV mandate” because at least at the federal level, there isn’t one. Per se. But the regulations – especially CAFE regs – effectively mandate EVs. It’s an extremely clever ploy by the car-hating Leftists that infest the DOT and EPA and the entire federal bureaucracy. More finely, who hate that people who aren’t them and most especially the working and middle class Deplorables who insist on driving V8-powered trucks and SUVs like the ones government apparatchiks get driven around in.

CAFE has been used for decades to dwindle down the size of vehicles and of engines available in mass-market vehicles that working and middle class people used to be able to afford and with the doubling of the “standards” under the Biden Thing the pincers were about to close completely, effectively forcing everyone into a device.

The 2024 election just prevented that.

“Artificially high fuel economy standards designed to meet non-statutory policy goals, such as those NHTSA has promulgated in recent years, impose large costs that render many vehicle models unaffordable for the average American family,” reads Duffy’s memo. “They also put coercive pressure on automakers to phase out production of various models of popular (internal combustion engine) vehicles.”

Italics added.

“Non-statutory policy goals” refers to edicts that were never passed by the legislature – Congress, in this case. Here Duffy touches on something of critical importance in that CAFE “standards” are not constitutional because Congress didn’t pass a law requiring vehicle manufacturers to meet them. The federal apparat just decreed them. More finely, the federal apparat has arrogated unconstitutional power to – effectively – legislate “standards” on its own arbitrary say-so. That it allows “public comment” prior to imposing whatever “standards” it likes does not legitimize the arbitrary saying-so. It is patently contrary to foundational language of the federal Constitution, which endows Congress only with the lawful authority (as distinct from arrogated power) to legislate.

Federal regulations such as CAFE “standards” operate as de facto laws, being enforceable as if they were laws. Since neither the EPA nor the DOT are mentioned in the Constitution and since the Constitution grants legislative power to Congress alone, a strong prima facie argument cam be made that not only are federal regulations such as CAFE “standards” unconstitutional usurpations of the legislative authority, apparats such as EPA and DOT are themselves unlawful – all of the foregoing being unconstitutional.

If Congress wants to pass a law that says vehicle manufacturers must build vehicles that average 50.4 miles per gallon or – going farther – that they must build electric devices only – Congress has statutory authority to do that, at least in terms of process. Such laws may themselves also be unconstitutional but at least they are laws emitted by the legislative body with the sole statutory authority under the Constitution to make laws at the federal level.

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Now that RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings are about to begin (today on 1/29—which can be watched here and tomorrow on 1/30), we are entering one of the most pivotal moments in the history of America’s health. Because of this, I believe it is critical to understand the context behind what’s actually going on, and for each of us to immediately contact our Senators by phone and email (whose contact information can be found here).

I thus significantly revised a eight-week-old article on the war against America’s health that provided much of the critical context over what’s actually going on behind the scenes now. This was done both so that we can pre-empt those tactics to secure RFK’s nomination, but also so that you see exactly what they are doing and hence can spot the next time it’s done (as what’s being done to RFK Jr. is so blatant and over-the-top many are recognizing it).

Note: I make a point to avoid repeatedly posting on political subjects (rather than those directly related to our health), but given how consequential RFK’s nomination will be for our health, I made an exception.

Silencing Dissent

Since COVID-19 began, those who tried to warn the public about the clear dangers of how we were addressing COVID-19 (e.g., lockdowns, vaccines, and remdesivir) have been targeted and silenced. While many were initially in disbelief our government could do something like this, more cynical parties (e.g., myself) suspected something like this would happen (as it always does) and caught the early warning signs of it.

In my eyes, beyond the over-the-top marketing throughout the media to promote the COVID boondoggle, there were three particularly noteworthy (and interwoven) facets to this campaign:

1. Widespread censorship of opposing ideas (e.g., GoFundMe deleting fundraisers for individuals who had severe COVID vaccine injuries and nowhere else to turn for help since those fundraisers alerted people to the vaccines not being completely “safe and effective” and most of the news networks refusing to question the COVID narrative). Of note, from the start, I assumed there had to be shadow banning occurring (as I could see the effects of it happen in real time) and coordination between the social media platforms and the Biden administration—an illegal activity which was gradually confirmed by lawsuits (e.g., due to the Twitter file) and other leaks that revealed shadow banning was widespread on the tech platforms.

2. The establishment targeted anyone who dissented against the narrative in a coordinated fashion. For example, many absurd complaints were used to target the medical licenses of physicians who were saving patients from dying from COVID (e.g., Meryl Nass, whose suspension was so absurd that 13 members of Maine’s legislature formally complained to the medical board about it).

3. A very aggressive and coordinated campaign to neutralize anyone who disputed the narrative on social media. Early on, I began to suspect this was happening because I’d see the same bad actors (typically doctors) use the same sculpted talking points. In April 2024, I found out an industry funded group did indeed exist, and that:
•Many of the people I’d suspected were in a coordinated conspiracy did indeed belong to a secret group (“Shots Heard”) dedicated to fighting misinformation online.
•That group was tied to the Federal Government and funded by the pharmaceutical industry.
•That group, one by one, would target dissident healthcare workers and attempt to both get them removed from social media, to have their medical licenses taken away or get them fired from work, and in some cases, to directly harass them at their homes.

The Vast Pharmaceutical Conspiracy to Silence Dissent Online

Fortunately, while these individuals were highly coordinated and had a significant amount of support behind them, they lacked an effective understanding of how to effectively influence online opinion (in part because their positions are lies—which makes them much harder to sell to the public). As such, while they were able to create a great deal of misery for activists who bravely challenged the COVID cartel, they were fairly ineffective at defending the narrative.

Recently, it began to be disclosed that the pharmaceutical and processed food lobbyists were targeting RFK Jr. to block him from getting his appointment as HHS (so they could continue poisoning America for profit). As I looked into what was happening, I noticed numerous similarities to what I’d observed with Shots Heard. I thus reached out to two Substack investigative journalists who have done great work throughout the pandemic, Sonia Elijah and John Davidson and asked them to help me look into this. Sure enough, they found what I’d expected would be there.

Lydia Green

Recently CNN hosted a hit pierce on RFK Jr. which featured a mom trying to find a way to explain how RFK “betrayed her” by convincing her to raise her child in a healthy manner.

After I saw this, my first thought was, “that was quite the attempt to make following a healthy lifestyle seem bad” followed by “her language was very sculpted, I wonder if a public relations firm hired her.” I then asked John Davidson about her background, and sure enough (as Davidson shows here) found out that she was in ‘Shots Heard’ and had a long history of working to promote the vaccine industry.

Furthermore (as you often see with PR firms after they’ve finished crafting the rhetoric most likely to benefit their client), her talking points were also featured in many other mainstream left-wing publications (e.g., NPR, Toronto Star, Cosmopolitan UK, AP, The Guardian, Newsweek, MSN)—something I find noteworthy because of just how absurd and nonsensical her arguments were.

Sometimes, the sculpted language they use is very clever, but other times it is patently ridiculous, especially when looked back upon after the current social hysteria has passed (e.g., consider many of the absurd lines used to sell the COVID vaccines or what Lydia Greene is saying). One particularly noteworthy one was used on national television to sell a smallpox vaccine campaign George W. Bush pushed for prior to invading Iraq (under the lie Saddam had smallpox he could release on the United States) that was quickly terminated because it gave too many people myocarditis.

Marsha: I want to see the vaccination made available, I want to see the vaccine made available soon, and I want my children to get it.

Announcer: After September 11th, Marsha Jordan-Burk asked her pediatrician to vaccinate her children against Smallpox.

Pediatrician: Their sense of urgency is, they don’t want their children getting destroyed the way the World Trade Center was destroyed.

Announcer: But Dr. Barnett had to tell her and many other parents since that there is no vaccine. The reason is a lack of supply.

Note: the disastrous experimental anthrax vaccine campaign (which disabled 250,000 military personnel) was initially justified under the Gulf War belief Saddam would unleash anthrax on our soldiers (which he never did).

In short, to quote Davidson’s investigation of that CNN segment:

So we have yet another organization masquerading as concerned former anti-vax moms who have been given an unbelievable amount of domestic and international press but are nothing more than an astroturf organization entirely funded completely by the HHS/CDC to spread their pro-vaccine messaging.

Note: Davidson also highlighted how another prominent “grassroots” and “parent-created” vaccine advocacy organization (Voices for Vaccines) takes money from almost every large pharmaceutical company on the planet.

Food Lobbyists

In a recent article, I discussed the chronology of the FDA’s War Against America’s Health and life-changing natural medicines like DMSO (which rapidly addresses chronic pain and a wide range of injuries) and GHB (which safely cures insomnia and the illness that results from chronic sleep deprivation).

Unfortunately, after industry failed to convince Congress or the Courts to block these efforts (as science was not on their side), they pivoted to directly pressuring the executive branch (e.g., the Secretary of Agriculture) to sabotage the FDA’s efforts to regulate industry, and just six years after he started, Harvey Wiley, the first head of the FDA (who was one of the most respected public servants in the country) resigned as he felt he could do more to help us as a private citizen than from within the government.

Because of this, many toxic food additives got “grandfathered” into our food supply as “generally recognized as safe” and to this day many chemicals that are legal to put in American foods have been banned in Europe.

In my eyes, the key takeaway from this time was how relentless the food industry would be to protect selling toxic and adulterated foods and that they used many of the same tactics we see now (e.g., cutthroat lobbying, blackmailing newspapers they advertised in not to support clean food laws and aggressively peddling paid off scientific “experts” to promote junk science). This in turn, led Wiley to argue that the only way to create political change to ensure a safe food supply was for the public at large to demand it.

The Monopolization of Food

Throughout history, two realities have always governed food.

First, food shortages are one of the greatest things which threaten a government’s stability. As such, leaders throughout history have been terrified of famine (to the point some were willing to start wars to reduce their population) as it often leads to rebellion and the ruling class being kicked out.

Second, one of the most reliable strategies for generating wealth and power has been to monopolize life-essential resources, and ever since the post-civil war era of the Robber Barons (where Rockefeller monopolized the oil industry), this tactic has become increasingly popular. For example, America’s public transportation industry was monopolized and then gutted (making sure cars were necessary), Rockefeller took over and transformed education into something that enslaved rather than empowered the populace, and many of the problems we face in medicine resulted from oligarchs like Rockefeller monopolizing American medicine (e.g., they funded the American Medical Association which aggressively eliminated superior natural therapies from competing with the medical industry).

Because of this principle, there has been increasing pushes to monopolize the food supply. On one end, Communist nations have done it by trying to eliminate independent farmers so the citizenry are forced to rely upon the state to be fed—policies which have led to some of the greatest carnage in history (e.g., Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine and Mao’s Great Leap Forward).

In Western society, this monopolization often follows a similar pattern once a viable strategy to monopolize a life-essential resource is discovered:
•An improved (scientific) way of obtaining the same life-essential resource is introduced to the society.
•Because of the apparent superiority of this approach and aggressive marketing and lobbying in favor of it, the population gradually shifts to using it rather than the traditional means of obtaining the life essential resource.
•In time, almost all of the population has lost the ability to obtain resources as they had traditionally done.
•Once all sources of competition are eliminated, the costs of (often unsustainable) the new way of doing things are continually raised until it becomes significantly worse than what preceded it.

Note: there are many examples of how this was done in medicine (e.g., I’m currently working on the medicalization of childbirth). Likewise, many clean and affordable energy technologies have been ruthlessly suppressed so that the costly and environmentally damaging technologies we use now can remain commercially viable (which I covered here).

In the case of agriculture, one of the most pivotal shifts occurred after World War I, when our newly created industrial capacity to create phosphate explosives was repurposed to create phosphate fertilizers. In tandem with this, the scientific consensus shifted to plant nutrition being primarily a product of the available nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) in the soil.
Note: ammonium nitrate, another common fertilizer, was also a key explosive used in World War I.

The NPK approach to agriculture initially dramatically increased crop yields, but was also quite problematic as it did not take into consideration the micronutrients (e.g., minerals) plants needed for growth, resulting in over-farmed soil quickly becoming nutritionally depleted and a variety of issues following (e.g., poor farming practices creating the devastating Dust Bowl during the great depression and large monoculture plantations which required increasing amounts of pesticides and herbicides to keep those nutritionally deprived plants viable).

Note: many believe the nutritional depletion of our soil is one of the root causes of the loss of vitality, which has gradually emerged over the last century (although I believe it began with the smallpox vaccine due to the blood stasis it created throughout the body, an issue which worsened with each subsequent vaccine [due to them also adversely affecting the physiologic zeta potential)). For those interested in learning more about the massive and sustained loss of vitality that has occurred over the last century (and what caused it), I synopsized our exploration of the subject here.

In my eyes, three other pivotal shifts in the food supply also help paint a critical picture of what happened to the food supply.

First, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture made the decision that America needed to transition from small family farms to large monoculture operations (his motto was “get big or get out”), a policy which coincided with major agribusinesses taking over the farming sector and farming subsidies which entrenched this new status quo. In contrast, family farms began to disappear from America.
Note: the farming subsidies work by setting a base price for each cash crop (e.g., corn) and then compensating farmers if they receive less for a crop than its set value. This forces farmers to overproduce the crops to compensate for the small margins and gives the processed food industry an incredibly cheap source of raw food materials. As a result, most of the processed foods we eat are components of those raw materials (e.g., corn, wheat, soy), along with chemical additives to turn them into “foods.”

Second, the tobacco industry (which had suffered numerous devastating defeats in court), in the 1980s decided to diversify by investing in the processed food industry. There, the industry scientists who had figured out how to make cigarettes highly addictive directed their focus to doing the same with processed foods (and from a young age marketing them to the entire population). As a result, these foods became extremely addictive—a Machiavellian tactic that allowed them to override the natural reflex humans would have to reject their unhealthy foods with a craving to consume as much of them as possible.
Note: David Kessler, the former head of the FDA, in his book The End of Overeating, shares that industry heads in the processed food industry admitted to him they deliberately engineered their foods to be addictive.

Third, the “Gene Revolution” (which was brought on by the US completely relaxing all regulatory safeguards on genetically modified foods) caused our food supply to be flooded with a wide range of experimental genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While a variety of issues exist with these organisms, I believe the most consequential ones are:
•They typically require much higher amounts of agricultural chemicals (e.g., Roundup) to grow and hence adversely affect people sensitive to higher levels of pesticides (which is a sizable portion of the population).
•There are a variety of ways GMOs adversely affect human health (that will almost never be studied by mainstream science).
•They can be patented and thus are aggressively used to monopolize agriculture. For example, many GMO crops are engineered not to produce seeds, so farmers have to purchase them each time they want to farm. Likewise, one of Monsanto’s infamous tactics was successfully suing farmers who had Monsanto’s GMO crops growing in their field because they drifted over from a neighbor’s farm. Most tragically, many of the predatory agricultural corporations (and groups like The Gates Foundation) have pushed GMOs on less affluent peoples and nation-states.
Note: Monsanto was acquired by Bayer in 2018 and technically no longer exists.

Read the Whole Article

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It’s not just that they tell us what to think, it’s that they train us how to think.

From grade school on we are fed a framework for thinking about the world whose premises are completely fraudulent. Any analysis which does not take place within that framework is portrayed as ignorant at best and dangerous extremism at worst.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about politics, we are trained to assume as our starting point that elections are real and that the official democratically elected government is the only power structure calling the shots in our country. We are trained to assume that decisions get made in our government based on how people vote in elections between two parties who oppose each other and promote the most organically popular positions on important issues in order to win votes. This is all complete bullshit, but it’s the foundation we’re taught to premise all our ideas and opinions about political matters upon.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about government, we are trained to assume as our starting point that the people running things in our country are known to us and occupy official positions in our capitol. We are trained to assume that if we have a problem with the way things are going, there are official channels through which the powerful can be held to account and real changes can be advanced. The fact that we are actually ruled by unelected plutocrats and empire managers who often have no position in the official government is never seriously entertained.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about the media, we are trained to assume as our starting point that we live in a free country with a free press instead of a dystopian civilization where the news media function as the propaganda services of our rulers. We are trained to assume that while some parts of the media may have obvious biases regarding which mainstream political faction they favor, it’s still possible to get a more or less accurate read on what’s happening in the world by listening to both sides of that ideological divide. None of this is true, but it’s the framework in which all mainstream analysis of the western media occurs.

Before we come up with a single thought of our own about foreign policy, we are trained to assume as our starting point that the US and its allies are more or less a force for good in this world, and that all the stories we hear about the governments and groups it works to destroy are more or less true. We are trained to assume that while the western power structure is imperfect and might make mistakes here and there, it must never stop killing and tyrannizing foreigners, because if it does, the bad guys might win. The easily quantifiable fact that the US-centralized empire is by far the most tyrannical and abusive power structure on earth never enters into the discussion.

This is the conceptual framework for thinking about the world that people are trained to espouse, first in school, and then throughout the rest of their lives by the mass media. If they go to university, as the most powerful people in our society typically do, then this framework is hammered home far more aggressively — especially in the most esteemed universities that the so-called “elite” tend to come from.

No thoughts which arise from outside this framework are taken seriously in mainstream politics, media, or academia. They might occasionally be entertained by friends over a bong or between chuckles on a podcast, but they are kept in the margins. This is reinforced by the way people learn that in order to ascend to influence and success they need to adhere to a specific way of thinking about things, thereby ensuring that all the most influential voices align with the authorized framework as well.

Ferocious disagreement is permitted, but before the debate even begins everyone involved needs to adhere to the founding assumptions of the official framework. After that you can argue as passionately as you like with the other side of this manufactured divide, because your ideas cannot pose any serious threat to your rulers.

And this, ultimately, is why the world looks the way it looks: because powerful people have been so successful at manipulating the way the public thinks about things. Our minds are inundated with propaganda telling us what to think, but more importantly they are shaped and programmed how to think about any new information they might come across.

Most of us are psychologically bent to the will of the powerful before we would ever even be in a position to begin thinking about opposing the status quo. We are herded like livestock away from thoughts of revolution and change, led by tightly controlled minds the way a bull is led by the ring on its nose.

Once you see how pervasive the conditioning is, you understand why getting real revolutionary movements going faces so much inertia. We won’t be able to free ourselves until we find a way to free our minds.

____________________

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