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US Democrat Senator Bob Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was sentenced to eleven years in prison by federal district judge Sidney Stein for acting as an illegal agent for Egypt and accepting cash and gold bars as payment.

How does this differ from the $1,417,811 bribe that Big Pharma pays in campaign contributions to Senator Bernie Sanders or the $821,941  campaign contribution Big Pharma pays to Senator Elizabeth Warren?  If you think these sums don’t make Sanders and Warren agents of Big Pharma, you are out of your mind.  Warren is doing her Big Pharma assigned job by trying to block Robert Kennedy’s confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Congress is up for sale, and it is purchased with campaign contributions. Everyone in Washington knows that members are purchased by lobby groups, such as Big Pharma, the military/security complex, agribusiness, energy, the Israel Lobby, and so on.  A corrupt or stupid Supreme Court legalized the purchase of the US government by lobby groups.  This is the reason that Congress does not represent the people who elect Congress. You can blame your lack of representation squarely on the US Supreme Court. One can’t help but wonder if there were under the table payoffs.

An uninformed person might answer that Menendez was paid personally, whereas campaign contributions are not personal money.  But, in fact, retiring members are entitled to take their election war fund with them.  Those planning to retire pay attention to building up their re-election funds.

An uninformed person might say that Menendez’s payments came from a foreign government, whereas campaign contributions are coming from American interests.  But what about the vast sums that Israel pours into purchasing the US government?  What is the difference between Egypt and Israel?  The difference is that AIPEC is not required to register as foreign agent and is treated as an American lobby group.  All efforts to have AIPEC register as a foreign agent have been blocked.  Many Zionist neoconservatives have gotten away with accepting money from Israel without having to register as representing a foreign agent.  Consider also that every year the Congress appropriates billions of dollars to Israel which Israel uses to purchase the US government with campaign contributions.  Our own money is used to enslave us to Israel and Jewish interests.  You can see how complete Israel’s ownership of the US government is by Congress’ invitation to Genocide Netanyahu to address the US Congress and award him 53 standing ovations while he conducts genocide against Palestine.

Generally speaking, when a senator or representative is prosecuted by the Justice (sic) Department it means someone wants him out of the way.  It is unclear why Menendez was in the way.  He was essential on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in getting the sanctions on Russia in place.  It is unclear what he could have done for Egypt that would harm any of Washington’s interests.

The sanctimonious judge Stein said: “The public cannot be led to the belief that you can get away with bribery, fraud, and betrayal.”  The judge doesn’t know what he is talking about. Lobbies get away with bribing every member of the House and Senate every day.

How can Trump make America Great Again when lobbies own the government?

The post The Arbitrary Hypocrisy of American ‘Justice’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

I was reading one of James Howard Kunstler’s exquisite essays when I stumbled upon a hilarious conversation in his comment section.  Discussing President Trump’s turbocharged criminal alien relocation efforts, a reader named Mitch observed, “People keep asking who’s going to man the grills, pick the crops, clean the houses when all the illegals get deported.  We have lots of useless government-paid parasites that could fill those jobs nicely.  They’re educated, speak English, and currently produce nothing but obstacles.”

Bandit replied, “But bureaucrats don’t do work.  They wouldn’t have a clue how to do anything useful, and I’m sure they don’t have the mental capacity to learn.”

Il faut savoir noted, “Working on farms is hard and demanding.  We have produced SOFT generations, heads down on their cell and social media, and have hyped their worthless degrees as big deals.  Getting some time on the farms and doing hard hand labor would not only get them in shape, but show them what the true value of work means.”

Finally, Beth Nicolaides dreamed, “I’d like to see a new IRS hire picking lettuce.”  (Me, too, Beth!)

I think this online conversation gets to the nub of the most pressing crisis in America: there has been a decades-long disconnect between the vast government bureaucracy and the American people whom that bureaucracy purportedly “serves.”  When President Wilson first empowered a permanent administrative state to handle the “business of governing,” he envisioned an educated workforce immune from the day-to-day passions of politics but uniquely qualified to direct the operations of the American state.  That was at best a naïve dream and at worst a calculated strategy to deprive the American people of their democratic powers and elevate a faculty lounge of Wilson clones as a new noble class.  (When it comes to academics, it’s difficult to know whether their love for impractical theorizing or narcissistic god complex is the root cause of their real-world failures.)

Without any doubt, the steady expansion of the federal government over the last hundred years has been an unmitigated disaster.  From its inception, Wilson’s “modern” bureaucracy became a home for scarcely camouflaged Marxist-socialists who wished to burrow inside the federal government and “transform” America’s Constitution from within.  They sabotaged Americans’ interests and undermined Americans’ individual liberties.  By hook or by crook, they constructed a hiring system that prevents their subsequent removal.  No matter how poorly they perform or how malicious their intent to damage the United States, bad government workers remain employed.

“Rule by mediocrity” has created a widening gulf between the American people and their government.  It has enabled a few million bureaucrats to work around the will of voters.  It has effectively transitioned America from a representative republic to a “blob”-ocracy that listens to and represents only the blob.  Consequently, Americans see their government as something separate from themselves — an exotic beast that has grown in spite of the Constitution’s explicit limitations.

Adding insult to injury, none of Wilson’s dreamy benefits materialized from the construction of a “professional” government.  Elevating “experts,” he insisted over a century ago, would allow the federal government to react quickly to domestic problems and foreign challenges.  “Smart” people who were well trained for the tasks at hand would be equipped to overcome any difficulty at a moment’s notice.  Do those descriptions remind anyone of the federal government?

It’s been four months since Hurricane Helene devastated the southern Appalachians, and FEMA still can’t find western North Carolina on a map.  The Pentagon wasted billions of dollars over the last four years fighting “climate change” and “white supremacy” while fast-tracking delusional men with fake breasts into positions of command.  California — which prides itself as a kind of premier “laboratory” for the federal government — cut its firefighting budget, stopped executing controlled burns of dangerously combustible brush, and diverted record rainfalls into the Pacific in order to save a “sacred” fish.  When wildfires predictably destroyed parts of L.A., California’s inept “laboratory” of “professional bureaucrats” were not smart enough to understand that empty fire hydrants had been the city’s undoing.  Instead, the “experts” blamed their own incompetence on “global warming.”

Read the Whole Article

The post Transitioning the Federal Workforce Into Farmhands appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump just wrote the following on his Truth Social account:

It does indeed appear that—for reasons that are now obvious—the designated route for rotorcraft traversing that section of the Potomac imposed a 200 foot ceiling. Tracking data reported by FlightRadar24 and FlightAware indicates the incident CRJ700 was descending through 375ft when it stopped transmitting.

If all of the above is confirmed, it raises the pressing question: Why did the Black Hawk pilot exceed the altitude limit by almost 2X?

According to an ABC News report, the pilot and crew were “very experienced.”

It was a very experienced group,” said Jonathan Koziol, a retired Army chief warrant officer with more than 30 years experience in flying Army helicopters. Koziol has been attached to the Unified Command Post created at Reagan National Airport to coordinate efforts following the deadly collision.

Koziol confirmed to reporters on a conference call that the male instructor pilot had more than 1,000 hours of flight time, the female pilot who was commanding the flight at the time had more than 500 hours of flight time, and the crew chief was also said to have hundreds of hours of flight time.

Though all of this experience sounds great, it makes one wonder all the more why the helicopter grossly exceeded a critical altitude limit for helicopters crossing the Potomac on the final approach to Washington Reagan.

The setting and timing of the disaster—in Washington D.C., a few days after Pete Hegseth was sworn in as Secretary of Defense—strike me as intriguing.

I wonder if the Army can be trusted to conduct and disclose the results of a full and transparent investigation instead of stonewalling—like it did when it came to investigating why its Patriot missile battery shot down a Navy F/A-18 Hornet on April 2, 2003.

From my years of reading military history, I know there was—until very recently—a widely held, firm conviction that mixing young males and females on board military vessels often results in a breakdown of discipline and attentiveness to duty. Did the male instructor have a romantic relation with the female student, perhaps one that had become volatile? NOTE: I am not claiming that this was the case; I am merely pointing out that if I were Secretary Hegseth, I would inquire about this possibility.

I also wonder about possible mental health deterioration in the military in recent years, with the Biden administration’s fetish for COVID-19 vaccines, transgender weirdness, and DEI.

Finally, even before this incident, I have wondered if the Trump administration will have to contend with crises arising from deliberate acts of sabotage. If I were an investigator, I would at least consider the possibility that the altimeter or other critical equipment on board the Black Hawk had been tampered with by a saboteur.

Here I would like to be very clear that I am NOT presenting conspiracy theories. I am merely stating the theoretical possibilities I would examine if I were investigating the accident.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

The post President Trump: ‘The Blackhawk Helicopter Was Flying Too High’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The case for getting out of NATO now encompasses four fundamental propositions:

• First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.
• Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.
• Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser treaties and commitments in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
• Fourthly, canceling NATO and its clones requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of foreign intervention, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.

As to the impending fiscal calamity, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan campaigned against the soaring Federal deficits in 1980 the public debt was $930 billion and about 30% of GDP. But it had erupted to $20 trillion by Donald Trump’s first election, now stands at $36 trillion and 125% of GDP and will be hitting $62 trillion by the mid-2030s.

Yet even that figure embodies CBO’s most recent Rosy Scenario fairy tale under which Congress never again adopts a single new spending increase or tax cut, including the impending $5 trillion extension of the expiring 2017 Trump tax cuts. And CBO is also pleased to forecast no recessions, no inflation recurrence, nor any other economic crises for the remainder of this decade and forever thereafter, world without end.

This dream also assumes that 7% of GDP deficits and annual interest expense of $1.7 trillion by 2034 will bring an average yield on the public debt at just 3.4%.

Yes, and if dogs could whistle the world would be a chorus! Give the average yield a minimally realistic 250 basis points boost, however, and now you have $3 trillion of annual debt service expense and a $4.5 trillion annual deficit by 2034.

In short, there is a doom-loop building inside the Federal fiscal equation under which soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire, powering the public debt upward to $150 trillion or 166% of GDP by mid-century under CBO’s baseline. Of course, long before the debt actually hits this staggering figure, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

In truth, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in the hot place of containing America’s impending public debt disaster unless the Empire is brought home and the national security budget is slashed by the aforementioned $500 billion per year. That’s especially urgent because – the merits aside – there is no chance whatsoever of getting big slices like this out of  the other two fiscal biggies, Social Security and Medicare, surrounded as they are by a wall of political terrorists on the left.

Fortunately, slashing the Pentagon by $500 billion is not only doable but fully warranted on the merits. Today’s bloated Empire-serving Warfare State is not remotely necessary for homeland security and the proper foreign policy of a peaceful Republic.

In this context, let’s start with the big, nasty national security budget numbers. Under a comprehensive reckoning for FY 2025 the total comes to just under $1.4 trillion, including:

• $927 billion for the national defense function.
• $66 billion for international operations and aid.
• $370 billion for veterans disability and health care.

When this stupendous total is looked at in historic perspective, three things standout. First, the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the subsequent disappearance of the heavily armed Soviet Empire into the dustbin of history left no visible trace on the national security budget.

In fact, at the peak of the Cold War in 1962 when the Soviet’s were at their industrial prime and JFK faced down Khrushchev in Cuba the comprehensive national security budget in today’s dollars stood at just $640 billion. That was barely 46% of the current level, and was still only $810 billion in 1990 on the eve of the Soviet collapse.

So what transpired thereafter is truly astounding. An adversary armed to the teeth with upwards of 37,000 nukes and nearly a 4 million man conventional armed force vanished entirely from the face of the earth, and yet and yet: The US national security budget kept rising skyward to the present $1.4 trillion without missing a beat.

The second key point is that the big budget increase during the Cold War occurred not in the heat of confrontation during the 1950s and 1960s but during the Reagan era of the 1980s when the Soviet Union was already on its last leg economically and politically. Yet between 1980 and 1990 the constant dollar national security budget soared by +42%, from $570 billion to the aforementioned $810 billion.

The explanation for this is straight-forward. During the Reagan Era the neocons hijacked the Republican party and cast its historic fiscal prudence to the winds. So doing, they claimed that massive defense increases were needed because the Soviet Union was on the verge of a nuclear first strike capacity.

That latter was an abject lie as proven by the fact that less than 10% of the Reagan defense build-up actually went to the strategic nuclear arsenal. By contrast, the overwhelming share of the 140% increase was allocated to conventional forces including the 600-ship Navy, massive increases in air power, new generations of battle tanks and armed personnel carriers, expanded air and sealift capacities and extensive new cruise missiles and electronics warfare capabilities.

All of these latter forces had but one purpose – overseas power projection and the conduct of wars of invasion and occupation in a world in which the US was not threatened in the slightest by any industrial power with expansive land-based and other conventional warfare capabilities.

The real effect of the Reagan defense build-up, therefore, was to supply future administrations with the military wherewithal to launch serial adventures in Regime Change. Thus, the Forever Wars from the First Gulf War onward were enabled by the Reagan build-up of unneeded conventional military capacity.

So when real defense spending should have been cut in half by $400 billion (FY 2025 $) after 1990 it was actually expanded by $600 billion to fund recurrent adventures in regime change and global intervention.

Thirdly, the Forever Wars have been a physical, medical and fiscal disaster. Currently 5 million wounded veterans receive disability compensation and 9 million receive health care benefits. That’s one out of every 30 adult Americans, and the overwhelming share of these VA beneficiaries are vets who served in the Vietnam War and the Forever Wars which followed.

Accordingly, what needs be described as the “deferred cost” of Empire has literally shot the moon. In today’s dollars, veterans benefits have risen from $57 billion in 1962, mainly representing WWII veterans, to $370 billion. This 6.5X rise represents the frightful human and fiscal tab for Vietnam and the Forever Wars.

So the question recurs. How did a peaceful Republic secure behind the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats, which until 1949 eschewed permanent “entangling alliances” abroad consistent with the wisdom of Washington, Jefferson and the Founders, end up with an global Empire and massive Warfare State budget that it doesn’t need and can’t any longer afford?

The answer, we believe, lies in three strategic mistakes made on the banks of the Potomac in 1917, 1949 and 1991, respectively, that have enabled the rise of a destructive Empire and its self-fueling Warfare State fiscal monster. Of course, the latter can only be eliminated by returning to Jefferson’s admonition that America should pursue –

Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

For most of its history, of course, America had adhered to this advice yet had been invasion-free owing to the great Atlantic and Pacific ocean moats. These blessings of Providence, in turn, enabled America to remain a peaceful Republic because its favorable geography precluded the need for a large standing military, heavy taxes, a powerful central government and, most especially, the need for entangling alliances with foreign nations.

In fact, an early treaty with France was canceled by Congress in 1797, meaning that the nation was free of permanent alliances for the next 152 years. Even as late as 1919 Congress prudently rejected the entanglements of the League of Nations Treaty after Woodrow Wilson’s foolish crusade not only failed to make the world safe for democracy but paved the way to the vast carnage of WWII.

It was only thereafter that an inexorable slide toward Empire incepted in 1949 when the Senate ratified the NATO Treaty. But, as we will argue, that was based on utterly false lessons from the world wars and a misguided theory of collective international security.

To be sure, prior to the giant historical error  of NATO in 1949, Jefferson’s admonition had been the default position of American governance. This was demonstrated by the radical demobilization of military forces even after America had elected to go to war in both 1917 and 1941. In both cases, the drastic rise and fall of military budgets left an unmistakable marker which reflected an underlying commitment to non-intervention abroad as a peacetime policy norm.

Thus, the US military budget on the eve of World War I was just $11 billion when expressed in present day dollars (2025 $) and amounted to a slim 0.9% of GDP. That’s because America had no foreign allies to support and it was the great ocean moats not a diminutive $11 billion military budget on which the nation’s homeland security safely rested.

After Wilson plunged American forces into the stalemated trenches on the Western Front, constant dollar military spending in today’s dollars soared 18-fold to $194 billion by war’s end in 1919. That amounted to nearly 15% of GDP at the wartime peak, but shortly after the armistice a sweeping demobilization began.

Soon, 100% of the troops were home – along with the bloated phalanx of wartime diplomats and civilian support operatives. Accordingly, defense spending bottomed out at just $12 billion in 1924, amounting to a 93% reduction from the wartime peak and just 0.8% of GDP.  The pre-war status quo ante had thus been fully restored, implying that the lurch into a foreign war and entanglements had amounted to a one-off venture, and a bad one at that.

Indeed, Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in the Great War was by then widely understood by the public to have been a calamitous mistake. The liberty and security of the American homeland had not been remotely threatened because by 1917 the German Fleet was quarantined in its Jutland home–port by the Royal Navy and all sides to the conflict were running out of draftable men, materiale, morale and fiscal resources.

Accordingly, on the date Congress declared war (April 6, 1917) there was not even the slightest chance of a German attack on America. Yet Wilson had plunged the US into the stalemated carnage of the old world for the vainglorious purpose of acquiring a powerful seat at the post–war peace conference, and so doing tipped the balance on the Western Front to a victory by the Entente powers led by England and France.

That is, the natural end to this pointless “world war” would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt and demoralized, and their respective domestic “war parties” subject to massive repudiation at the post-war polls. But the arrival of two million fresh American doughboys and massive flows of armaments and loans from Washington literally rechanneled the course of history, enabling a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles – a travesty that sowed the seeds for the even more destructive and calamitous second world war.

Specifically, Wilson’s foolish intervention encouraged a last futile offensive by Russia in the summer of 1917, the failure of which gave birth to the bloody Revolution of Lenin and Stalin later that fall. Likewise, Wilson’s machinations with the victors at Versailles and their parceling out of the parts and pieces of Germany to France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and others fostered the stab-in-the-back myth and revanchist campaigns on which Hitler rode to power.

More importantly still, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed in the years after 1945. To wit, the Wilson–enabled and wholly aberrational rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen, as claimed, because the good people of England, France and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s. These monsters of the 20th century were not resident in the DNA of nations nor do they continuously lurk among the lesser tinpots who rise from time to time to authoritarian tyranny among the far flung nations of the earth.

To the contrary, they were aberrations – freaks of historical happenstance. That means that even after the two catastrophic world wars there was no baseline case for Empire as a requisite of America’s homeland security. Washington and Jefferson were still correct even in 1946 and beyond.

The permanent Washington-based Empire of bases, alliances, collective security and relentless CIA meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries that arose after 1946 was therefore the second unforced error – one that flowed from Wilson’s original mistake.

For a brief moment after WWII ended, of course, Jefferson’s admonition had prevailed when another massive post-war demobilization occurred, laying the ground for a return to the pre–1914 status quo ante. Accordingly, the war-weary Washington policy makers were absolutely correct when they brought America’s 12 million-man expeditionary force home from Asia, Europe and the Seven Seas after August 1945, reducing it to just 1.47 million by 1948.

So doing, they also abruptly closed the fiscal sluice-gates to what had become America’s Brobdingnagian war budget, which had peaked at $83 billion in 1945 before plunging to just $9 billion by 1948.

Moreover, when translated into present day dollars, the magnitude of this second demobilization becomes crystal clear: Constant dollar spending (FY 2025 $) dropped form $1.7 trillion in 1945 to just $125 billion by 1948, marking another stunning 93% reduction in post-war military spending.

And well it should have. Among the burned out and exhausted lands abroad after V-E Day and V-J Day there was absolutely no military threat anywhere on the planet to the homeland security and liberty of America.

Japan’s leading cities had been fried alive by horrendous nuclear and conventional bombing assaults; Germany’s industrial and urban areas had been laid waste by bomber storms night after night for months on end; Italy had long since hung its wartime leader in a convulsion of political upheaval; France was barely functioning economically and politically after four years of brutal Nazi occupation; England was utterly bankrupt and so demoralized that its electorate had thrown its wartime leader, Winston Churchill, to the political wolves; and that is to say nothing of the prostate corpus of Stalinist Russia.

And we do mean prostrate. During WWII Soviet Russia had suffered 27 million military and civilian deaths due to bombs, bullets, starvation, disease, pestilence, atrocities and other barely imaginable inhuman afflictions. And that was atop 32,000 industrial enterprises that had been pulverized along with upwards of 70,000 towns and villages destroyed, leaving tens of millions of Soviet citizens destitute owing to the brutality of both their communist rulers at home and the German invaders who had descended upon them from the west for the second time in 25 years.

In some kind of ghoulish absolution, therefore, the slate had been wiped clean. There was not even a scant reason for American expeditionary forces to remain outside the homeland after 1945. Nor was there any need whatsoever to maintain bases, alliances and commitments to intervene anywhere abroad that would put American servicemen in harms’ way and involve Washington in the “entangling alliances” against which Jefferson and Washington himself had forewarned.

And yet and yet. Washington’s incipient “War Party” of military contractors and globe-trotting operatives and officialdom gestated in the heat of World War II and jazzed-up on $1.7 trillion of war spending was not about to go quietly into the good night. Instead, the Cold War was midwifed on the banks of the Potomac when President Truman fell under the spell of war-hawks like Secretary James Byrnes, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal and the Dulles brothers, who were loath to go back to their mundane lives as civilian bankers, politicians or peacetime diplomats.

So exactly 11 months after Hitlers’ demise at his own hand in his bunker and eight months after Armageddon had been visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the out-of-power but inveterate war-mongering Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri.

That was the opening call to the Cold War, which was powerfully seconded barely 10 months latter when the then accidental US president from the same state delivered his “Truman Doctrine” speech to the Congress. That latter was a belligerent oration which ignited the Cold War and the costly, suffocating post-1947 web of entangling alliances and the budget-crushing American Empire it fostered.

In light of all that was known then and which has transpired since, however, it can be well and truly said that the ruckus in Greece and Turkey caused by local communist parties, which was the basis for Truman’s declaration, didn’t amount to a hill-of-beans with respect to the homeland security of America. These long ago political skirmishes should get but a scant mention in world history books, and none at all in America’s.

That is to say, with respect to Turkey Stalin wanted a port on the Dardanelles, as had all the Russian Czars for generations before him. But so what? The only thing he could have choked off was his own minuscule export shipments from the Black Sea regions.

Likewise, after a decade of brutal political and economic oppression by a homegrown dictatorship during 1936 to 1941 and then by the Nazi, Italian Fascist and Bulgarian occupiers during WWII, the Greek people were seeking more relief than could be delivered by the sickly exiled King George II. The British in their purported wisdom had put the latter back on the Greek throne in 1946.

As it happened, the population of Greece at the time was 7.3 million and even in today’s dollars its GDP was just $50 billion and $7,000 per capita. In short, Greece was a museum piece of western history that had seen its better days but by then was an economic cipher. Had the local communist party come to power absent Truman’s intervention – with the aid of Stalin or not – that misfortune for the Greek people would have had no bearing on America’s homeland security 5,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic moat.

As it happened, of course, the Truman Doctrine was the handiwork of Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. The latter was a pompous Yale-trained international lawyer from Washington’s elite Covington & Burling, who had been a New Dealer during the early 1930s and then came back as an assistant secretary of state for economic policy in February 1941.

From that perch he had designed the American/British/Dutch embargo that cut off 95% of Japan’s oil supply and paved the way to Pearl Harbor. Indeed, he was actually the “trigger man” for America’s entry into World War II when he unilaterally acted to shut-off 100% of Japan’s oil while FDR was away meeting with Churchill at the famous “Atlantic Charter” confab in Newfoundland in August 1941.

Acheson was also an inveterate anglophile who apparently suffered from empire-envy. He thus imagined that America should step into Great Britain’s imperial shoes when it emerged economically crippled and politically fractured from WWII and could no longer provide financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey.

So upon this advice from the Brits in February 1947, Acheson had sprung into action. In a pivotal meeting shortly thereafter between Congressmen and State Department officials, Acheson articulated what would later become known as the “domino theory.”

He stated that more was at stake than Greece and Turkey, for if those two key states should fall, communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India. Acheson reportedly concluded that “not since the days of Rome and Carthage” had such a polarization of power existed.

That was utter poppycock, but even then neither Iran nor India had any meaningful bearing on America’s homeland security. Should their people have made the stupid mistake of voting in the small but noisy communist parties that had taken root in both countries after 1919 it would have been of little note nor material threat to the liberty and security of Americans from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.

The Greek-Turkey aid gambit of March 1947, of course, was just the opening salvo. Soon the baleful idea that communist political gains anywhere in democratic Europe were to be viewed as cause for national security alarms gathered momentum on the banks of the Potomac. That unwarranted leap took root especially among the wartime dandies and policy potentates who had fashioned and led America’s global mobilization during WWII.

Accordingly, the modest $400 million aid to Greece and Turkey quickly ballooned into the Marshall plan announced in June 1947. Now the economic dislocations in France, Italy and elsewhere in western Europe and the resulting political gains of the communists and other leftist parties became the basis for drastically expanded US intervention.

Again, in today’s dollars the Marshall plan provided upwards of $175 billion to Western European countries between 1948 and 1951. Needless to say, by virtue of doling out such tremendous sums of money – which in present day dollars exceeded current Ukraine spending so far – Washington was soon knee-deep in the domestic politics, economics and inter-country relationships and intrigues of post-war Europe.

But why? There was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that a communist Italy or communist France or red Luxembourg would have been a military threat to the US. Or even that in league with Soviet Russia they would have posed a conventional military challenge on the New Jersey shores 4,000 miles to the further side of the Atlantic moat—most especially when the United States still had a monopoly on the A-bomb.

Indeed, the US had left WWII with the greatest assemblage of naval power in human history. This included 28 aircraft carriers, 23 battleships, 72 cruisers, 377 destroyers, and numerous other vessels. Altogether this amounted to 10 million tons of naval vessel capacity or more than six times the 1.5 million tons of the Soviet Navy, whose fleets consisted of far fewer and far less lethal warships.

Needless to say, therefore, neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall plan advanced America’s homeland security in any material manner. The requisite military muscle had already been bought and paid for during WWII.

But these interventions did grease the slippery slope to NATO and entangling alliances and interventions stretching to all four corners of the planet in the years ahead. And they did most definitely set off alarm bells in the Kremlin, where the hyper-paranoid Joseph Stalin everywhere and always expected treachery from friend and foe alike.

That was a given – considering the slippery, blood-soaked path by which he had climbed to absolute power in the Soviet Union itself and the treachery of Hitler’s double-cross after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the subsequent devastating invasion of Russia by the Nazi. So it is not surprising that Stalin soon suspected that his wartime allies – especially with FDR and Churchill gone – were laying the groundwork for the isolation and encirclement of Soviet Russia, exactly as the US, England and France had attempted after WWI.

To be sure, Stalin was among the most wretched, evil rulers ever to oppress a decent-sized chunk of mankind, and would have remained a blight on his own countrymen and ogre before the world during the remaining six years of his despicable life. But he was no threat to the American homeland as the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove in spades.

These documents, in fact, amount to the national security dog which didn’t bark. Dig, scour, search and forage thru them as you might. Yet they will fail to reveal any Soviet plan or capability to militarily conquer western Europe.

They show, therefore, that Washington’s standing up of NATO was a giant historical mistake. It was not needed to contain Soviet military aggression, but it did foster a half-century of hegemonic folly in Washington and a fiscally crushing Warfare State – the fiscal girth of which became orders of magnitude larger than required for defense of the homeland in North America.

It is in the nature of human history, it seems, that a wrong path taken like Wilson’s error in plunging America into the Great War in 1917, frequently begets another baleful turn. In this case, the slippery slope had further materialized when Britain and America had needed to align with the vile red tyrants of Moscow to rid the world of the Hitlerian nightmare after 1941.

Indeed, the need for this wartime alliance with the devil seemed so urgent at the time to both Churchill and FDR that they more or less ceded the nations of eastern Europe to the then advancing Red Army at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. That historic meet-up, by the way, was in Russian Crimea, not the Ukraine.

In return for Stalin’s continued march toward Berlin and promise of help in vanquishing Japan in the Far East as well, the Big Three principals reached an understanding that the Soviet Union would exert significant influence over Eastern Europe, including Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and parts of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Of course, free elections and democratic governments were to arise in areas occupied by the Red Army, but neither Churchill nor FDR went to any length to provide the enforcement mechanisms to ensure this would happen. It was a case of saying Eastern Europe is in your sphere of influence, Uncle Joe – by wink from the cynical Churchill and by nod from the doddering Roosevelt.

For his part, of course, Stalin was then in the business of rescuing his bloody regime from the near extinction event that had accompanied the Nazi invasion. His aim, therefore, was not about the ideological project of extending communism westward. Instead, it was focused on driving the remnants of the Wehrmacht from his own country and establishing an invincible “cordon sanitaire” from the Baltic to the Adriatic, as Churchill himself later charged, so as to never again allow marauding armies from western Europe to invade and plunder the Russian motherland.

Needless to say, the arrival of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO – within 25 months between March 1947 and April 1949 when the NATO Treaty was signed in Washington – sent Stalin’s wartime understandings into a tailspin. Slowly at first and then aggressively in the end his initial fear that the wartime alliance was being abandoned by his capitalist allies gave way to a paranoid certainty that they were once again in the business of attempting to encircle and destroy the Soviet Union.

But even the resulting Soviet departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington.

We are referring to the latter’s badly misplaced fears that deteriorating economic conditions in Western Europe could lead to the aforementioned communist parties coming to political power in France, Italy and elsewhere. But as we have seen, that wasn’t a serious military threat to America’s homeland security in any event because the post-war Soviet economy was a shambles and its military had been bled and exhausted by its death struggle with the Wehrmacht.

To be sure, communist governments in Western Europe would have been a misfortune for any electorate who stupidly put them in power. But that would have been their domestic governance problem over there, not a threat to the American homeland over here.

Nevertheless, Washington’s gratuitous antidote for what was essentially an internal political problem in western Europe was a sweeping course of economic and military interventions in European affairs. These initiatives were clinically described as “containment” measures designed only to keep the Soviet Union in its lane, not a prelude to an attack on eastern Europe or Moscow itself.

But if you examine a thousand random documents from the archives of the Soviet foreign ministry, top communist party echelons and correspondence to and from Stalin himself it is readily apparent that these initiatives were viewed in Moscow as anything but a polite message to stay in lane. To the contrary, they were seen on the Soviet side as a definitely unfriendly scheme of encirclement and an incipient assault on the Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe, or the cordon sanitaire, that Stalin believed he had won at Yalta.

To be sure, writing off this string of what came to be called “captive nations” would have amounted to an embrace of realpolitik that would have made moralists and anti-communist ideologues uneasy in the extreme. But as it happened, abandonment of Eastern Europe per the Yalta zones of influence scheme was exactly what became Washington’s de facto policy until the very end of the Cold War in 1991, anyway.

That is to say, the uprisings against the Soviet hegemon in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981 generated no response from the West beyond empty speeches and hortatory resolutions from western parliaments. The whole policy of “containment”, therefore, was actually just a large-scale and sustained effort by Washington to steer European politics away from the communist Left.

But why in the hell was thwarting the foolishness of communism in Europe America’s business at all? That is, NATO was essentially an instrument of political control on the European side of the Atlantic, not a military shield that added any incremental security for the citizens domiciled on the North American side of the pond.

So the question recurs as to exactly why was America’s fully warranted post-war demobilization reversed for no good reason of homeland military security?

Part of the answer is embedded in the prevalent Keynesian theorem popular in Washington at the time which held that post-war demobilization would result in a devastating collapse of so-called “aggregate demand” and a resulting spiral into depression. Unless treated with aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal stabilization measures, therefore, it would be the 1930s all over again.

However, most of Europe was fiscally incapacitated owing to the impacts of the war. The economic aid proffered by Washington through the Marshall plan, therefore, amounted to a surrogate form of Keynesian stabilization against a depressionary relapse.

Needless to say, the hive mind on the Potomac had it all wrong, and the evidence was right in its own backyard. During the very first year of demobilization, in fact, the US private sector economy came bounding out of the starting gates after being freed from wartime controls. Real private GDP grew by nearly 27% in 1946 over prior year and never looked back, and it did so with no fiscal stabilization help from Washington, which was blocked by a Republican Congress.

What in 1945 had been a private sector GDP of $1.55 trillion in today’s dollars had jumped to nearly $2.0 trillion by 1947 and to more than $2.3 trillion by 1950. Thus, even as the US was making the turn from a war economy to the booming prosperity of the 1950s, private sector GDP expanded by nearly 50% with the growth rate clocking in at 7.6% per annum over the five-year period. So the American economy never came close to tumbling into the feared Keynesian abyss.

That the prevailing Keynesian theorem was just plain wrong, however, was well illustrated by the contemporaneous economic rebound in the western zone of Germany. The latter’s economy took off well before the Marshall Plan aid made any substantial impact owing to Ludwig Erhard’s famous turn to currency reform and free market policies.

In short, Washington’s Soviet “containment” policies were unnecessary as a matter of America’s homeland military security – the only valid basis for the foreign policy of peaceful Republic. Yet based on fuzzy thinking about economics and the taste for international power politics that had been acquired by Washington’s ruling class and military contractors during WWII the US stumbled into the very entangling alliances that Washington and Jefferson had forsworn. These European entanglements, in turn, surely and inexorably formed the gateway to Empire and the fiscally crushing Warfare State that now plagues the nation.

The irony, of course, is that there was actually nothing to “contain’. The documents show the Soviet leadership’s prime concern was consolidating the territory and security gains in Eastern Europe which the USSR had won with blood and treasure in the war against Hitler.

Thus, for several weeks after Secretary Marshall’s June 5, 1947 speech at Harvard, the archives show that Soviet leaders hoped it might prove to be a source of capital for the reconstruction of the war-damaged USSR and provide an opening for it to extract the war reparations from Germany about which Moscow was totally obsessed.

As the details of the American plan unfolded, however, the Soviet leadership slowly came to view it as an attempt to use economic aid not only to consolidate a potentially hostile Western European bloc, but also to undermine recently-won, and still somewhat tenuous, Soviet gains in Eastern Europe.

At length, therefore, Stalin ordered Poland and Czechoslovakia to withdraw from the intra-Europe consultation meetings in July 1947 that involved discussions with the west about joining the Marshall Plan – discussions he had initially blessed. Thereafter, all Soviet bloc participation in the Marshall Plan ceased and Stalin’s calculus shifted sharply from accommodation and towards a strategy of confrontational unilateral action to secure Soviet interests.

Nor were the Kremlin’s fears entirely an exercise in Stalin-style paranoia. As Scott D. Parrish, a leading scholar of the Soviet archives, concluded,

…What the new documentation helps us see more clearly, then, is that the real difficulty and source of conflict in 1947 was neither Soviet nor American “aggression.” Rather, it lay in the unstable international economic and political conditions in key European countries which led both sides to believe that the current status quo was unstable… And it was this same environment that compelled Stalin to respond to the plan with a series of tactically offensive maneuvers which fanned the flames of confrontation even higher. This decisive moment in the emergence of the Cold War was thus more a story of tragedy than evil.

The Soviet Union’s acquisition of the A-bomb in 1949 did not change the equation or gainsay the case that the entanglements of the Marshall Plan and NATO were a mistake. Crucially, neither did it create a military requirement for US air bases in Europe or alliances with European countries.

Instead, home territories and the open oceans and skies turned out to be more than adequate for basing the nuclear arsenals of both sides, as the Cuban Missile Crisis fully clarified.

Indeed, once both sides had the A-bomb the age of nuclear deterrence or MAD (mutual assured destruction) commenced. Notwithstanding the fringe views of Dr. Strangelove types like Herman Khan, nuclear war was soon deemed to be unwinnable and the focus shifted to the ability to reliably deliver a devastating second strike in response to a potential nuclear provocation.

This “assured” destruction was itself the defense against nuclear attack. But to be an effective deterrent the opposing side had to believe that its opponent’s ability to deliver was operationally full-proof and highly certain to happen.

In this respect during the strategic bomber age of the 1950s the US had such deterrence capacity early on – with long-range strategic bombers capable of reaching the Soviet Union and returning with mid-air refueling. These strategic bombers including the B-50 Superfortress and the B-36 Peacemaker had impressive range capabilities, with the latter reaching 10,000 miles.

However, it was the introduction of the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress in 1955 that removed any doubt. The B-52 had a range of nearly 9,000 miles without aerial refueling, even as it carried a payload of A-bombs far heavier than any previous aircraft, was powered by far more reliable engines and could attain altitudes beyond the reach of interdiction.

As it happened, the Soviets were late to the strategic bomber game, even after they detonated a serviceable nuke in August 1949. At the time and for several years to follow the Soviets relied upon the Tupolev Tu-4 to deliver their A-bombs, which was a reverse-engineered copy of America’s earlier, far less capable B-29. Accordingly, the Soviet bombers faced significant challenges, including limited range and payload capacity, which made it difficult to deliver a meaningful number of nukes to the U.S. without risking detection and interception.

Still, the Soviets soon learned the deterrence game. When the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile age (ICBM) materialized in the second half of the 1950s, the Soviets were the first to demonstrate a successful ICBM in mid-1957. Yet not withstanding the vaunted “missile gap” charge by JFK during the 1960 campaign, the Soviet Union had only deployed 4 ICBMs by 1960.

The United States did not conduct its own first successful ICBM tests until October 1959. But by the end of the following year it had deployed approximately 20 Atlas ICBMs, which figure grew to 129 ICBMs by the peak of the liquid fueled rocket era in 1962. So there was a missile gap alright, but one massively in the US’ favor.

As the decade unfolded, both sides developed far larger numbers of more powerful, reliable and securely-protected, solid-fuel ICBMs, but neither the logic nor logistics of nuclear deterrence ever changed. To wit, the core national security policy of both sides remained based on the certainty of a devastating second strike retaliation against the cities and industries of a foe, delivered by ICBMs securely based in hardened underground silos in their home territories.

As technology evolved the same logic was extended to submarine based missiles, which were not only hidden even more securely in the deep ocean bottoms, but also required no allied partners to operate.

In short, by the time the Cold War reached it peak in the mid-1960s, two thing had been established. First, strategic nuclear deterrence was the heart of national security for both sides and was operated unilaterally from bases in the home country of each. In America’s case, therefore, the technological advances of the 20th century in no way negated the wisdom of the Founders’ 18th century admonition to eschew entangling alliances.

Secondly, throughout the entirety of the Cold War the Soviet Union never presented any meaningful threat of conventional military attacks on the USA, which remained secure on the far side of the great ocean moats.

In fact, even at its military peak in the 1980s the Soviet Navy had but a single Nimitz class aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, and only a handful of amphibious ships and troop transports capable of reaching America. This rudimentary sealift capacity would have faced, in any event, insuperable challenges landing on the New Jersey coast owing to lack of air cover, antisubmarine protection and sufficient refueling logistics.

Thus, a Secret CIA analysis from 1979 (now unclassified) admits:

Soviet armed forces do not maintain units designated as intervention forces nor do their military writings describe intervention as a basic military mission. In fact, their writings generally reflect a lack of interest in putting forces ashore to fight in distant areas. Available classified writings focus almost entirely on the wartime mission of the Soviet armed forces on the Eurasian landmass in a NATO-Warsaw Pact war.

Thus, even in the second half of the 20th century, NATO was not any kind of militarily necessary defense asset for the US. To the contrary, from the very get-go NATO was a make-work project for the State Department and foreign affairs officialdom including wartime spooks who were out of business after August 1945; and, at length, became a marketing organization for the US military-industrial complex and its congressional pork barrel champions.

Stated differently, NATO was not about homeland military security but was actually a globalist project of international politics that eventually transformed Washington into a menace and the War Capital of the World. So doing, NATO and the whole string of entangling alliances it begat elsewhere on the planet, functioned to actually diminish America’s homeland security, even as it added mightily to its fiscal cost.

That’s because the nearly 300,000 US servicemen remaining in Europe during the Cold War and the scores of bases and facilities which supported them were stationed there as “trip wires”. Their purpose was to bring the US to the fight immediately upon a Soviet incursion in western Europe. While the latter was an exceedingly low-probability contingency, it should have been addressed, in any case, by Europe’s own military capabilities from its own fiscal resources. After all these years, Donald Trump is absolutely correct on that matter.

The great irony, of course, is that Washington’s plunge into “entangling alliances” has had the effect of sharply lessening Europe’s Warfare State costs by shifting these burdens to American taxpayers. The latter consequently funded a globe-spanning Warfare State that massively exceeded the military requirements of homeland security.

So while NATO and its regional clones brought no extra homeland security, what America did get was the privilege of indirectly footing the bill for Europe’s generous Welfare State, which gobbled up with alacrity the fiscal resources that might otherwise have gone to defense.

As the great Senator Robert Taft held at the time, the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with a invincible nuclear deterrent and conventional fortress defense of America’s airspace and shorelines. As he said in his speech against ratification of the NATO Treaty:

… If we undertake to arm all the nations around Russia from Norway on the north to Turkey on the south, and Russia sees itself ringed about gradually by so-called defensive arms from Norway and Denmark to Turkey and Greece, it may form a different opinion. It may decide that the arming of western Europe, regardless of its present purpose, looks to an attack upon Russia. Its view may be unreasonable, and I think it is.

(But) how would we feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for instance?

On another occasion Taft made clear that even in the incipient Cold War World of 1950, the wisdom of the Founders still pertained:

Our traditional policy of neutrality and non-interference with other nations was based on the principle that this policy was the best way to avoid disputes with other nations and to maintain the liberty of this country without war. From the days of George Washington…. it has always opposed any commitment by the United States, in advance, to take any military action outside of our territory.

For want of doubt, just consider that every single war fought after the 1949 NATO Treaty ratification was unnecessary and a scandalous waste of American treasure and blood – to say nothing of the millions of foreigners who have been killed and maimed by these military interventions and occupations.

That is to say, how in the world was America’s homeland security enhanced by the pointless bloodbath on the Korean peninsula just one year after NATO’s birth? Had China and the regime in Pyongyang prevailed would Seoul today actually look that much different than Shanghai?

For crying out loud, the economic and social regime of Shanghai and Seoul are essentially irrelevant to America’s homeland security way over here on this side of the Pacific moat.

Likewise, what was accomplished by the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. Since that paved the way for restoration of the brutal thievery of the Shah and the even more benighted rule of the mullahs who replaced him, exactly what was the point? Denying the Soviets a Persian Gulf port for a blue water Navy that it never actually had?

Soon came the partition of Vietnam, its own civil war and an utterly heinous Washington intervention that brought death to 58,000 American soldiers along with 300,000 wounded and 75,000 severely disabled for life. And that’s to say nothing of 3.4 million Vietnamese – 60% of whom were civilians – whose lives were snuffed out and for what?

So that this “domino” would not fall into the laps of the Chicoms, which were allegedly doing the bidding of the Kremlin? Yet what in the world did this slaughter contribute to America’s homeland security then and most especially now?

After all, three decades after the Soviets passed into the dustbin of history and 52 years after Nixon went to Beijing and was feted by Mao, Vietnam remains an “unfallen” domino. Rather than being under the thumb of Beijing, in fact, the red capitalists of Vietnam are now exporting even cheaper tennis shoes and flat panel displays to America, thereby taking away market share on the shelves of Walmart from the red capitalists of China.

Indeed, in the light of history all of the Forever Wars and interventions that flowed from the Empire which was built upon the false foundation of NATO were not just pointless; they were tantamount to criminal undertakings – given the historical stupidity of their purpose.

And yet and yet. The list of interventions and regime change adventures goes on and on – almost always on the grounds that these disasters were necessary to support local “allies” or bolster regional stability. On that score, the Forever Wars visited upon the middle east are especially loathsome.

The first Gulf War, for instance, amounted to a fight between Saddam Hussein and the Emir of Kuwait over directional drilling in the Rumaila oilfield that straddled their border. But so frickin’ what!

There is not the slightest case that this intervention on behalf of a purported “ally” in Kuwait that we didn’t need in the first place had any benefit to to the homeland security of America. It simply provided occasion for a CNN reality TV show about tank battles in the desert.

The same can be said of the shock and awe campaign a decade later that finally suspended Saddam from the end of a rope – only to open Iraq to anti-American chaos led by the dominant vengeance-seeking Shiite population. Ditto for Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon – all victims of Washington conducted or supplied military assaults that had absolutely nothing to do with the military defense of the North American continent.

Indeed, the interventions boxscore since Washington abandoned the Founders’ wisdom regarding foreign entanglements and the peaceful, solvent Republic which went with it is approximately 0 wins, 12 losses.  Every single one of these significant interventions in behalf of entangling alliances and Washington’s global empire have been a failure.

That surely has profound implications. It must perforce mean that the predicate on which they were based was deeply and dangerously flawed.

Yet that’s not the half of it. Today the Empire is flat-out bankrupting what has become a Leviathan on the Potomac that has no resemblance whatsoever to the peaceful Republic that Ben Franklin warned would be an everlasting challenge to keep.

In fact, the case for a true America First policy – that is, returning to the pre-1948 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture – has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades.

That’s because in today’s world, the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail. That is to say, the threat of an adversary with a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal and effective that it could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Fortunately, there is no nation on earth that has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of its own country and people if it attempted to strike first.

After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s – all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of four-to-five warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located and neutralized before any would be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started.

Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move.

Likewise, the 400 Minutemen III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case for drastically downsizing America’s military muscle. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget as detailed on a system-by-system basis by CBO. Moreover, the sea-based ballistic missile force is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade. That’s only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline for that period.

So after setting aside $75 billion per year for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $900 billion+ in the CBO defense spending baseline would needed in a post-NATO world shorn of America’s entangling alliances, foreign bases and foolish overseas commitments such as decreeing which Chinese factions are permitted to rule Taiwan.

That is, what would be the cost of a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?

The starting point is that in the present world order there is no technologically-advanced industrial power which has either the capability or intention to attack the American homeland with conventional invasionary forces. To do that you would need a massive military armada including a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been even dreamed of by any other nation on the planet.

You also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiale in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries, allies and economic commerce in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?

Obviously, no nation has the GDP or military heft to successful execute and invasion of the American homeland. Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its ordinary defense budget apart from the SMO is $75 billion, which amounts to about four weeks of waste in the Pentagon’s $950 billion monster.

As for China, it doesn’t have the sustainable economic heft to even think about landing on the California shores, notwithstanding Wall Street’s endless kowtowing to the China Boom. The fact is, China has accumulated in excess of $50 trillion of debt in barely two decades!

Therefore, it didn’t grow organically in the historic capitalist mode; it printed, borrowed, spent and built like there was no tomorrow. The resulting simulacrum of prosperity would not last six months if China’s $3.6 trillion global export market – the source of the hard cash that keeps its Ponzi upright – were to crash, which is exactly what would happen if it tried to invade America.

To be sure, China’s totalitarian leaders are immensely misguided and downright evil from the perspective of their oppressed population. But they are not stupid. They stay in power by keeping the people relatively fat and happy and would never risk bringing down what amounts to an economic house of cards.

Indeed, when it comes to the threat of a conventional military invasion the vast Atlantic and Pacific moats are even greater barriers to foreign military assault in the 21st century than they so successfully proved to be in the 19th century. That’s because today’s advanced surveillance technology and anti-ship missiles would consign an enemy naval armada to Davy Jones’ Locker nearly as soon as it steamed out of its own territorial waters.

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high tech surveillance assets a massive conventional force armada couldn’t possibly be secretly built, tested and mustered for surprise attack without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Japanese strike force steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

Indeed, America’s ostensible “enemies” actually have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier – the aforementioned 1980s era relic which has been in dry-dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships and suite of attack and fighter aircraft nor even an active crew.

Likewise, China has just three aircraft carriers—two of which are refurbished rust buckets purchased from the remnants of the old Soviet Union (actually Ukraine!), and which carriers do not even have modern catapults for launching their strike aircraft.

In short, neither China nor Russia will be steaming their tiny 3 and 1 carrier battle groups toward the shores of either California or New Jersey any time soon. An invasionary force that had any chance at all of surviving a US fortress defense of cruise missiles, drones, jet fighters, attack submarines and electronics warfare, we’d dare say, need to be 100X larger.

Again, there is also no GDP in the world – $2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China – that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion, or even $100 trillion, that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

Still, Washington maintains a globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability driven by NATO and other foreign entanglements that it never really – even during the cold war. But now, fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration, it amounts to utterly extraneous and unneeded muscle.

We are referring, of course, to the 173,000 US troops in 159 countries and the network of 750 bases in 80 countries. This includes:

• 19 bases and nearly 34,000 troops in Germany.
• 44 bases and 12,250 troops in Italy.
• 25 bases and 9,275 troops in the .
• 120 bases and 53,700 troops in Japan.
• 73 bases and 26,400 troops in South Korea

All told, Washington equips, trains and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million not for purposes of homeland defense but overwhelmingly for missions of overseas offense, invasion and occupation all over the planet. So if Washington withdrew from NATO and its clones, conventional military requirements would shrink drastically.

The starting point for a post-NATO military posture, therefore, is the drastic downsizing of the nearly one-million man standing US Army. The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America for hand-to-hand combat with the US Army, as it were, are virtually non-existent. With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, attack submarines and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.

Yet the 462,000 active-duty army soldiers at $112,000 per year each have an annual budget cost of $55 billion, while the 506,000 army reserve forces at $32,000 each cost upwards of $16 billion. And on top of this force structure, of course, you have $77 billion for operations and maintenance, $27 billion for procurement, $22 billion for RDT&E and $4 billion for everything else (based on the FY 2025 budget request).

In all, the current Army budget totals nearly $200 billion, and virtually all of that massive expenditure – nearly 3X the total defense budget of Russia – is deployed in the service of NATO and Empire, not homeland defense. It could readily be cut by 70% or $140 billion – meaning that the US Army component of a $450 billion Fortress America defense budget would absorb just $60 billion annually.

Likewise, the US Navy and Marine Corps spends $55 billion annually on 515,000 active-duty forces and another $3.7 billion on 88,000 reserves. Yet if you look at the core requirements of a Fortress America defense posture, these forces and expenses are way over the top, as well.

By core missions were refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, the direct manpower requirements for the 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs is about 4,500 and the overall total is about 10,000 military personal when Admirals, overhead, support and woke compliance is included (or not).

Likewise, the 50 or so attack and cruise missile subs have two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead.

In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 enlisted men, officers and overhead brass or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps.

On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft, meaning that the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and 140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead.

Finally, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense because the latter includes neither the “halls of Montezuma or the shores of Tripoli”.

In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is unnecessary muscle.

Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea-lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.

Overall, the current Navy/Marine Corps budget stands at about $236 billion when you include $59 billion for military personnel, $81 billion for O&M, $67 billion for procurement, $26 billion for RDT&E and $4 billion for all other. A $96 billion or 40% cut, therefore, would still leave $140 billion for the core missions of a Fortress America defense.

Among the services, the $246 billion contained in the Air Force budget is considerably more heavily oriented to a post-NATO Fortress America versus Empire-based national security posture than is the case with the Army and Navy. Both the Minuteman land-based leg of the strategic triad and the B-52 and B-2 bomber forces are funded in this section of the defense budget.

And while a significant fraction of the budget for the manning, operations and procurement of conventional aircraft and missile forces is currently devoted to overseas missions, only the airlift and foreign base component of those outlays inherently function in the service of Empire.

Under a post-NATO Fortress America defense, therefore, a substantial part of the conventional air power, which includes upwards of 4,000 fixed wing and rotary aircraft, would be repurposed to homeland defense missions. Accordingly, upwards of 75% or $180 billion of the current Air Force budget would remain in place, limiting the savings to just $65 billion.

Finally, an especially sharp knife could be brought down upon the $181 billion component of the  current defense budget which is for the Pentagon and DOD-wide overhead operations. Fully $110 billion or 61% of that huge sum – again more than 2X the total military budget of Russia – is actually for the army of DOD civilian employees and DC/Virginia based contractors which feast upon the Warfare State.

In terms of homeland security, much of these expenditures are not simply unnecessary – they are actually counter-productive. They constitute the taxpayer-funded lobby and influence-peddling force that keeps the Empire alive and fully funded on Capitol Hill. Even then, a 38% allowance or $70 billion for the Defense Department functions would more than provide for the true needs of a Fortress America defense.

Overall, therefore, re-sizing the DOD portion of the national security budget to a post-NATO world would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid. Adjusted for inflation through the end of the second Trump term in FY 2029 the total savings would come to $500 billion per year.

Moreover, the resulting allowances (FY 2025 basis) of $60 billion for the Army, $140 billion for the Navy, $180 billion for the Air Force and $70 for DOD-wide operations would shrink the defense component of the Warfare State to $450 billion per year. In current dollars of purchasing power that happens to be exactly what Eisenhower thought was more than adequate for national security when he warned of the military-industrial complex during his farewell address 63 years ago.

At the end of the day, Bush the Elder should have parachuted into the NATO Ramstein air base in Germany and declared “mission accomplished” 34 years ago when the Cold War officially ended – even after 42 years of an unnecessary and largely counter-productive existence.

But surely now the time to bring the Empire home is long, long overdue. The $1.4 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State is no longer even remotely affordable as it fuels a spiraling public debt that menaces the very future of constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity in the American Republic.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post NATO: The Case To Get Out Now appeared first on LewRockwell.

Was it the miasma of cognitive dissonance blackening the air-space over the DC swamp that caused the deadly collision of AA Flight 5342 and a Blackhawk Helicopter this week — an impenetrable fog arising from the fetid exhalations of so many hyperventilating swamp creatures brooding between the urges of fight-or-flight as Mr. Trump deploys his chosen pest-controllers across the Potomac Basin?

Altogether, these many parasitical swamp creatures make up the greater DC blob, and the blob convulsing and fibrillating is what you witness in these committee hearings with Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. For instance, fake “progressive” Bernie Sanders (D-VT) faced with the reveal that he leads his colleagues in pharma “contributions” (just under $2-million) . . . or fake Cherokee Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a fugue state over the perceived threat of Mr. Kennedy to pharma profits . . . or presidential pardon recipient Adam Schiff (D-CA) lecturing Mr. Patel on ethical behavior. . . or Ms. Gabbard enduring the meltdown of Senate Intel Committee tool Michael Bennet (D-CO).

Behind these histrionics by the big gators and peccaries of the collapsing Democratic Party is pure scintillating fear. They are afraid that all of their hoaxes and lies of recent years will be exposed in the months ahead. And they fear that such exposure might lead eventually to legal complications for them. All of that implies loss-of-power, the single element that demonically drives their careers.

The fact is they have already lost their grip on the levers of power and, for the moment, that is all that matters. They especially no longer control the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, the many public health agencies under Health and Human Services, and the many-footed intel “community,” as it styles itself. These agencies are where the truth about our national affairs has been locked up. Now, the citizens will either see what’s there, or find out what has been deliberately destroyed — such as the internal agency email correspondence over RussiaGate, the Covid-19 operation (and the deadly vaxx campaign), the J-6 affair (and the pipe-bomb sideshow), the weird, documented irregularities of the 2020 election, the Ukraine War money-laundering shenanigans, the manifold janky DOJ prosecutions of Mr. Trump, and much more.

Every day now since January 20, heads explode all over DC as the executive orders roll out and the insanity of whatever lurked behind “Joe Biden” gets systematically expunged from the order of things. And as this happens, the more plainly deranged the past four years looks. Did they really believe that men dressing-up as women would improve the US military? Or was it a traitorous effort to weaken and demoralize our armed forces? Was DEI a public ethics exercise or a massive jobs program for incompetents?

In what way did “Joe Biden’s” Department of Homeland Security imagine that funneling known criminals, certified lunatics, and saboteurs across the border squared with their duty to protect and defend the country? And how did it happen that US taxpayers’ money got shelled out to fake “religious” NGOs in Mexico minting debit cards for border-jumpers, handing them wads of cash, cell phones, airplane tickets, fully-equipped backpacks, and apps for evading arrest? In effect these NGOs took over the exact job description of “coyote” formerly performed by the criminal cartels — leaving the cartels free for the more lucrative rackets of dealing fentanyl and trafficking women and children.

The corruption in all this has been supernatural, and the fact that, until late 2024, seventy-million Democratic Party American voters thought this was all okay is extra-supernatural. What happened to their minds? The cliché of “Trump derangement” doesn’t really answer that. What it probably comes down to was the stunningly successful mind-fucking operation run by the blob (the CIA and the darker elements of the DOD in particular), in league with captured news media, to bend and distort the consensual perception of reality — all of which leads to the question: why?

The two main answers to that seem to be 1) Some organized entity seeking to destroy the country for instance, the Chinese Communist Party, or the World Economic Forum, or 2) that the blob had evolved into such an overt criminal racketeering operation that it increasingly and desperately needed to keep covering its mighty ass. Thus, the Democratic Party became the blob’s enforcer and the news media became its propaganda arm. And the “thinking class” of America especially got ignominiously hosed by all that.

There’s a pretty good chance that blob agents in the Senate will successfully block the confirmations of Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. They are all superlative candidates for the particular jobs at HHS, ODNI, and the FBI. But know this: excellent as they are, there are a great many other worthy, dedicated, and stalwart warriors in this land who can take their places if necessary. The blob has already lost in the political battle-space. All they can manage at this point is some rearguard action.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Six Ways From Sunday appeared first on LewRockwell.

The issue of California secession isn’t going away.

Last week, the California secretary of state approved a new ballot measure on secession for the signature gathering phase of the initiative process. If activists are able to collect enough signatures by late July, voters in 2028 will be able to vote yes or no to the question “Should California leave the United States and become a free and independent country?”

A majority vote for this measure wouldn’t sever ties with the United States government, of course. It would merely create a commission to study the option of political independence.

Even if the measure managed to get a majority vote, it would do little, legally speaking. On the other hand, it certainly would continue a political and ideological process that is a necessary—albeit insufficient—condition for eventual separation.

The issue of redrawing California’s borders has arisen repeatedly over the past twenty years., Whether we’re talking the “Six Californias” attempt to break the state up into smaller pieces, or the 2017 “Calexit” campaign, talk of radical change to California’s status quo isn’t going away. This repetition of calls for change is essential to laying the ground work for eventual secession. Each new campaign in itself has few implications for the short term, but in longer term, pushing the option over and over does make secession more likely. After all, as we’ve seen in the dozens of successful cases of secession since 1945, an important first step is thinking in terms of separateness and independence.

California Secession Would Be Great for “Rump America”

Unfortunately, we are only at the beginning of a long process, but most of us who presently reside in the tax farm called “the United States” would be much better off if California were to secede as soon as possible.

Now, I know that many of my readers are not big fans of California—or at least the politicians elected by the people there—and are not inclined to cheer on the state’s political activists. Nonetheless, for those of us who actually want to improve prospects for greater freedom and less state power in North America, we ought to wholeheartedly support secession for California.

The immediate benefits should be clear. In a recent article on Trump’s call for annexing Canada, I noted that adding Canada to the US would be like adding a second California. Such an annexation would greatly shift American political ideology to the left and import millions of new voters who favor policies like government-controlled healthcare and draconian gun-control measures.

California secession would work in the opposite direction. By placing California outside the borders of the United States, the US would free itself from millions of voters who, like Canadians, generally favor high taxation, runaway government spending, stringent gun control, and harsh government regulations of nearly every kind. American politics would shift much more in favor of free markets, relative fiscal restraint, and public safety. California’s 52 members of the House of Representatives would be eliminated from the US Congress, as would be the state’s two senators. Most of these, of course, are dedicated social democrats of the Kamala Harris variety. The political and ideological status quo among America’s elected officials would be transformed overnight.

This would by no means change the US into a laissez-faire paradise, but the positive change would be immense.

Moreover, California residents would cease to be US citizens, and thus would no longer be eligible to vote in US elections. No longer would residents of nearby regions like Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Texas have to suffer waves of Californian migrants who are free to recreate the disastrous political realities of California in new locations.

The damage done by these migrant Californians is magnified by the fact that, so long as California is part of the United States, a Californian’s citizenship seamlessly transfers to the new state. That is, Californian migrants are able to almost immediately participate in the political system in their adopted homes—to the disadvantage of longtime residents. After California secedes, this unfortunate situation would come to an end, and Californians would become foreign nationals when living in the “Old United States.” No longer would the corporatist Silicon Valley “elites”—most of whom are dedicated servants of the surveillance state—and the retired civil “servants” of California, living on fat pensions, be able to so easily hijack the political institutions of non-Californians.

Nor would these foreign nationals from California be eligible for the welfare state of Rump America. After all, without California policymakers present to block every attempt at reforming the US’s broken system of naturalization, Americans would be free to ensure that foreign nationals no longer receive free money from the taxpayers. Rather, only migrants who are able to support themselves would find it feasible to relocate to the Old United States.

This isn’t to say that no one from California would be welcome. Without the opportunity to live on the dole, and without immediate access to the benefits of citizenship, it is likely only the most motivated and industrious Californians would seek to emigrate to Rump America. The minority of Californians who actually value freedom and fiscal sanity, and who are capable of leaving other people alone, should be welcomed with open arms in Rump America.

Secession Is the Future

Admittedly, this is all unlikely to happen in the short term. A response one often hears from those who reflexively defend the status quo is “it will never happen.” But in the world of politics, “never” is an absurdly long time. One can consult any political map of the world as it was 100 years ago to see just how non-permanent political institutions are. Rather, political disintegration of the United States is inevitable. It happens to every large state eventually, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s as only one recent example. In the late 1980s, most of these prophets of what will “never happen” also told us that the USSR would last for many generations more.

The United States is already well down this road. Culturally, the US is heavily splintered and divided. The average resident of, say, Massachusetts or New York views the average resident of Texas or Alabama with contempt and fear. Similar feelings likely run in the opposite direction. Donald Trump, being hailed as having won a “landslide” victory, couldn’t even eke out more than 50 percent of the vote. 48 percent of American voters liked Kamala Harris enough to actually cast a ballot for her. This is not a country that is united in any sense of the word.

Rather, the United States is today held together only by an intricate system of federal patronage. The federal government, using taxpayer money, essentially pays people to make sure they remain attached to, and dependent on, the central government. For example, the federal welfare state has been fabulously successful at making a large portion of the population hooked on the government’s social benefits. As we saw in the failed secession vote in Scotland in 2014, pensioners will reliably support the central government so long as it continues to dole out cash to these elderly wards of the state. American recipients of Social Security are no different. Few of these will support secession if it disrupts access to their precious government checks.  Meanwhile, an enormous system of farm subsidies, military spending, federal contracts, and NGOS ensures that millions of Americans owe their livelihoods to the central governments. Movements toward secession threaten to disrupt these gravy trains.

On the other hand, disintegration will come when the patronage system begins to falter. As the US rushes toward a federal debt of forty trillion dollars—soon to be followed by fifty trillion—the US government will find it harder and hard to balance its growing debt payments with the usual “generosity” of the state. Americans will then have to look to other institutions for their livelihoods, their pensions, and their “free stuff.” That is when secession starts to become a far more attractive option. After all, why stay attached to a political system that takes so much, and offers so little in return?

Until then, the best we can do is agitate for disunion, independence, and an orderly dismantling of the American leviathan state. It’s good preparation for the inevitable future.

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

The post Now Is a Great Time for California To Secede appeared first on LewRockwell.

Word traps and false logic don’t lead to dominance of the future or monopolistic grips on limitless profits.

The heart of the current euphoric expectations for AI is a simple but problematic proposition: the equivalence of function equals intelligence. If using natural language requires intelligence, and a computer can use natural language, then it’s intelligent. If it takes intelligence to compose an essay on Charles Darwin, and an AI program can compose an essay on Charles Darwin, then the AI program is intelligent.

The problem here is this “equivalence is proof of intelligence” is a function of word-traps and false logic, not actual equivalence; what is claimed to be be equivalent isn’t equivalent at all. In other words, the source of confusion is how we choose to define “intelligence,” which is itself a word-trap of the sort that philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to resolve using koan-like propositions and logic.

Imagine for a moment we had twenty words to describe all the characteristics of what we lump into “intelligence.” We would then be parsing the characteristics and output of AI programs by a much larger set of comparisons.

The notion of equivalence goes back a long way. As science developed models for how Nature functioned, the idea that Nature was akin to a mechanism like a clock gained mindshare.

The discoveries of relativity and quantum effects blew this model to pieces, as Nature turned out to be a very strange clock, to the point that the “Nature as a mechanism” model was abandoned as inadequate.

We have yet to reach the limits of the “equivalence is proof of intelligence” model, which is as outdated and nonsensical as “the universe is a mechanism” model. We keep finding new examples of equivalence to support the idea that a computer program running instructions is “intelligent” because it can perform tasks we associate with “intelligence” because we’re embedded in a mechanistic conceptualization of the entirety of Nature–including ourselves.

So there is much excitement when an AI program exhibits “emergent properties,” meaning that it develops behaviors / processes that weren’t explicitly programmed. This is then touted as an “equivalence proving intelligence:” this “ability to create something new” is proof of intelligence.

But Nature is chockful of emergent properties that no one hypes as “proof of intelligence.” Ant colonies generate all sorts of emergent properties, but nobody is claiming that ant colonies have human-level intelligence are are poised to take over the world.

AI programs parrot content and techniques generated by humans. Since they use natural language, we’re fooled by equivalence into thinking, “hey, the program is as smart as we are, because only we use natural language.”

The same conceptual trap opens in every purported equivalence. If an AI program can find the answer to a complex problem such as “how do proteins fold?”, and do so far faster than we can, we immediately project this supposed equivalence into “super-intelligence.”

The problem is the AI program is simply parroting techniques generated by humans and extrapolating them at scale. The program doesn’t “understand” proteins, their functions in Nature or in our bodies, or anything else about proteins that humans understand.

Defining anything by equivalence is false logic, a false logic we fall into so easily because words are traps that we don’t even recognize as traps.

Wittgenstein concluded that all problems such as “is AI intelligent?” were based in language, not the real world. Once we become ensnared in language and its implicit byways and restrictions, we lose our way. This truth is revealed by words that have no direct equivalent in other languages.

One example of this is the Japanese word aware (a-waar-re), which has a range of nuanced meanings with no equivalent in English: a sweet sadness at the passage of time, a specific flavor of poignant nostalgia and awareness of time. This word is key to understanding Japanese culture, and yet there is no equivalent word in English, either in meaning or cultural centrality.

In other words–what if there is no equivalent, and the supposed equivalence is nothing more than a confusion caused by word-traps and false logic? The entire supposition that we can model human intelligence with mechanistic equivalences (intelligence is a mechanism) collapses, along with projections of “super-intelligence.”

The temptation to keep trying to equate “intelligence” and programs with mechanistic equivalence is compelling because we’re so embedded in the mechanistic model we don’t even realize it’s a black hole of false logic that has only one possible output: nonsensical claims of “intelligence” based on some absurdly reductionist equivalence.

The temptation in this mechanistic conceptual trap is to reckon that if we only define our words more carefully, then we’ll be able to “prove equivalence is real.” This too is false. Wittgenstein eventually moved away from the model of the imprecision of language is the source of all our intellectual problems. It isn’t that simple: more precise definitions only generate more convoluted claims of false equivalences.

The book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (via B.J.) lays out the false conceptual assumptions holding up the entire edifice of AI.

Michael Polanyi’s classic Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy explains that knowing is an art, a reality explored by Donald Schon in The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action.

Read the Whole Article

The post AI Is a Digital Parrot: Word-Traps, False Logic and the Illusion of Intelligence appeared first on LewRockwell.

There are programs out there for writing books quickly using AI. I am not talking about that. I am talking about using your own mind. It is possible to write a book in a weekend. I talk more about all the steps that I use and that anyone can use to write, publish, and market a book in a year free here.

But I’m going to go into more detail in a different area, an area that I would like more people who share my mindset about the world to understand, in hopes that you, too, can be more effective in promoting your ideas in the world.

Beware of the Know-It-Alls

Before the Four-Minute Mile was run, it was considered a physiological impossibility by many. After the Four Minute Mile was run, it soon became a plausible goal that many attained and achieved. The psychological breakthrough was achieved, which meant that the artificially imposed limits no longer existed.

There are many know-it-alls in life. One should watch out for them. When someone tells you how to do something, a good next question is, “Have you had personal experience with this topic?” and “How you had success in this area?”

There are millions of know-it-alls who do little more than walk through the world squelching human potential with no regard for the fidelity of their words. I despise such behavior. There are other more sickening behaviors, but I put this behavior on my list as one of the sickest things that exist in the world around us.

I am a bestselling writer. I have done hundreds of media interviews. I have published thousands of pieces. I have written and published scores of books. In a weekend, a person can write a book. In fact, a weekend is a perfect time to write a book, because you are giving yourself a compact amount of time to get the work done.

Honor Inspiration

Since I was 15 years old, I have carried a little spiral notebook and pen with me. When an idea came to me, I wrote it down. Sometimes when I wrote it down, the next idea came to me. I wrote that down. You guessed it, sometimes the next idea then came to me. Sometimes it would stop there; sometimes a complete outline would come; sometimes a complete essay would come.

By simply following this process diligently, I have found the ability to write 5, 6, even 7 one-thousand word essays in a day. It all begins with me diligently writing down the idea in my head — no matter what the idea is. I know I just need to get it out of my head and onto paper. That is the first step.

I have no idea how people walk around with ideas in their head all day long that they do not commit to paper and expect to make them actionable. That is not within my skillset. But, at the same time, based on my discussions with others, I do not think it is in most people’s skillsets. They seldom get anything done with those ideas.

Depending on the person, any of these things can totally clear out the mind and cut off prior thoughts that a person had established on the topic: A difficult day, a tragic incident, a thought provoking movie, a heavy night of drinking, a relaxing weekend away.

Your mind is only so linear. If you do not use the tool of pen and paper, you will miss out on important opportunities. If you honor the tool of pen and paper and honor the gift of inspiration, I know from personal experience and from discussions with others that this is a pathway to prolific writing. There are many conversations I have had on the topic of writing, many books I’ve read (mostly filled with nonsense), many courses I’ve taken (mostly filled with nonsense). How to better write, and publish, and otherwise share my ideas with others, is a topic I have dedicated a vast part of my life to. That has required sorting through a lot of nonsense from know-it-alls.

A lot of people are not willing to take the step of carrying a notebook and pen with them. A lot of people are not willing to jump into action as soon as the moment of inspiration arrives. Often, I have 30 seconds or less to get an idea out of my head before the flow of inspiration is broken. I might be able to hang onto that single idea, but the second, third, and fourth idea will not come if I do not act quickly and commit the idea to paper. It is not the single idea that means so much; it is the complete collection of ideas that makes an essay, that makes a plan, that makes a consistent argument. The complete set of ideas must be the real goal that needs pursuing and the tool of pen and paper, diligently used, is a powerful way to arrive at that goal.

Editing Is A Separate Process From Writing

Get your idea on paper. Step away. Look at it in the morning. If you are anything like me, you will see that 80% of it is garbage. You will have zero interest in sharing it with anyone. You will not waste your time editing it. You will perhaps even be embarrassed that you wrote such nonsense. What were you thinking? That’s okay. Accept it.

Don’t Worry About Making Mistakes

Just get your idea out on paper. Come back later, and worry about mistakes, or offensive words, or stupid ideas. Just get it out of you. Evaluate later. These are two different steps.

Be Ready To Drop What You Are Doing

Anyone in my daily life knows that I will periodically withdraw from what is happening and step to the side for 20 minutes. When inspiration hits, I start writing, and I expect others to respect that when they are with me, allowing me space to go for a walk or find a quiet corner. That’s how much I respect that inspiration when it comes. I’ve seen too many lives changed by it to not have that respect. At the same time, when I am with people (and there is no inspiration), they have my full attention. I reject the toxic trend that today exists — I am not on my cell phone when I am conversing with other humans.

Develop A Habit

I think it is good to have a daily expectation that you will write something. I usually have a several times daily expectation to both write and publish. Some people have a less frequent expectation. That is okay too. That’s up to you. More frequent iterations help to develop more effective, expert-level skills, and more quickly. I believe you should place some expectation on yourself and develop a habit around it.

Honor Deadlines

Parkinson’s Law says that work will expand to fill the amount of time you allot for it. Those who recognize that push themselves into tight deadlines and work hard to develop themselves in a way that understands how to set and honor tight deadlines. I may not expect most people to be able to snap their fingers and write a book this weekend, but I know that all people serious about doing so can build the skills to do that. I put together a free step-by-step for writing a book in a year for you here. Have a look at it, and try it. before you know it, you will have developed the same skills to eventually do it a shorter time. You likely understand the importance of just starting and then improving upon it with experience, and you likely see how this resource can be helpful to you.

Encapsulate Yourself

Just like the idea of deadlines is a way to encapsulate yourself, you may find your daily environment to be too distracting. Go to a place for two days and be focussed on walking away with a book. Turn off the cell phone. Turn off wifi. Part with your daily routine. Make your days decisively about accomplishing your goal.

When There Is More Work, Get A Team Together

I had an intellectual curiosity that I wanted to develop. I wanted to know more personally. I knew that the book writing process was a good way to get this done. It was going to be exactly the kind of book I wanted to read. My table fits ten or so people, so it became the perfect place to do the work that weekend. I went on Craigslist Monday and posted a few ads. I got people I hired together and all day Friday and Saturday we worked until we had a several-hundred page finished book, chock full of the highest quality research, and a new website, complete with an online sales page.

Take A Pledge Not To Use AI

AI is a neat tool. AI is terribly overrated in its current state. AI can be used for some cool things. Until you have the process above figured out, and know your limits, I ask that you not use AI for your writing. It would actually be my preference that you use AI not at all for your writing. Any of us can make a book this weekend using AI. Something tells me that whatever you produce with AI is going to be far inferior to the thing that you create with your mind.

AI in its current iteration could possibly be a useful research tool, but only as a first step, to find some useful legitimate resources to work from, just like Wikipedia is a good place to find some useful legitimate resources to work from. AI is incredibly limited for anyone who honors fidelity of their views. For me, that’s a big deal. For me it is important that the views that come out of my mouth are true to me, the same with the words that I publish alongside my name.

There could be reasons that I might want to publish books under a pseudonym using AI, but I do not ever intend to publish a book in my own name using AI. AI, by its nature, is not a mark of quality, but a system likely to produce the lowest common denominator outcome.

The value of a poet and a writer is not to regurgitate pablum. It is to produce for his reader, fresh ideas that will inject vitality to their lives. In fact, I consider this role so important that I seek to spend part of my life at the little traveled fringes of society, so that I can identify truth from there and bring it back to my readers.

Since the introduction of Page Rank, developed by Google co-founder Larry Page in the late 1990s, internet search is a lowest common denominator concept. Quality has been a challenge, and one that internet search has largely ignored. Thankfully, from that time, until approximately 2015, Google was excellent at providing users with what they wanted. Since approximately 2015, when Google was finally co-opted by those with a specific political objective, Google has provided users with what Google wanted them to see, rather than what the user wanted to see.

Internet search has been past its heyday since that time. All that is required to return it there is for a serious company to come along and use the original Google algorithm that Larry Page developed. It will be good for internet search, but it will remain a tool, like AI, that is only able to provide a lowest common denominator experience.

Your mind, your judgement, your wisdom, is able to produce better for your reader. Using AI for your writing should be considered below you.

The post How I Write a Book in a Weekend (Without Using AI) appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tulsi Slams Deep State At Confirmation Hearing: “I Refuse To Be Their Puppet”

During her confirmation hearing to become President Trump’s head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard hit back at Democrats and RINO ‘conservatives’ who have spent months smearing her as a Russian asset or a threat to national security.

During opening remarks, Gabbard cited examples of how the intelligence community agencies have been politicised against Trump and his supporters, asserting “this must end.”

Tulsi Slams Deep State At Confirmation Hearing: “I Refuse To Be Their Puppet” – modernity

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Thanks, Jim Jatras:

How Can Trump End The Russia/Ukraine War?

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to end the Russia/Ukraine war on day one. Then, as President, we were told that he had given his special envoy Keith Kellog 100 days to wind the war down. Former State Department and US Senate official Jim Jatras joins today’s Liberty Report to discuss where Trump is getting it wrong…and how to fix it. Also today: Tulsi exposes one of the greatest national security scandals of all time.

 

The post Jatras on Ron Paul Liberty Report with Daniel McAdams appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

New neocon manifesto: Keep US troops in the Middle East forever

Responsible Statecraft

 

The post New neocon manifesto: Keep US troops in the Middle East forever appeared first on LewRockwell.

Welcome to another Free-form Friday on America’s Untold Stories with Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley! This week, we dive into the latest D.C. plane crash, Trump’s fiery criticism of Biden and the FAA, and the intense confirmation hearings for RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel. Plus, what’s really going on with the mysterious drones over New Jersey, and why did a Tesla Roadster get mistaken for an asteroid?

Trump slams FAA for hiring unqualified workers – did policy cost lives?
RFK Jr. and Tulsi grilled in the Senate – what did we learn?
NJ drone mystery deepens – why didn’t the FAA admit authorization?
Trump’s NYC immigration raids begin – who’s being deported?

All this and more on America’s Untold Stories – Free-form Friday! Stay tuned for breaking news, deep analysis, and untold truths.

The post America’s Untold Stories: Plane Crash, Confirmations & Trump’s Crackdown – Big Week in DC! appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Steve Kirsch

 

The post Czech record level data shows Moderna recipients had up to a 50% higher death rate than Pfizer recipients appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post How Can Trump End The Russia/Ukraine War? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Wayne Goodfellow:

Should be an interesting election running on a Justin Trudeau 2.0 platform. High inflation, food banks, carbon taxes, weak Canadian dollar, unaffordable housing, declining standard of living, growing lines waiting for health care, affirmative action and other assaults on the merit principle, open borders costing Canadians >$50 billion per year, and many more progressive economic and social policies of national suicide. Vote Liberal/NDP and destroy what remains of this once great nation called Canada. And I didn’t even mention the onerous Trump tariffs. 

See here.

 

The post Justin Trudeau 2.0 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

“Operation Wrath of Zion” Aims to Dox and Deport Pro-Palestinian Protestors in New York City.

 

The post “Operation Wrath of Zion” Aims to Dox and Deport Pro-Palestinian Protestors in New York City appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith.

UN chief demands evacuation of 2,500 Gaza children at ‘imminent risk’ of death | Reuters 

 

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Writes Tim McGraw:

Start the Video at 2:00. The control tower contacts PAT25 (the Blackhawk helicopter) three times, telling PAT25 to pass aft of the incoming CRJ (Canadian Airliner) and maintain separation.

The Blackhawk helicopter, PAT25, never replies to the tower’s commands. That’s not right. Something is going on here. If it was a training flight, the instructor or the pilot of the helicopter would have replied to the tower and acknowledged the order to fly aft of the CRJ flight.

The post Radar Images and Radio Communications from Aircraft Collision in Washington, D.C. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Tim McGraw:

I think Da Vinci is right. Reagan Airport (DCA) should be a military airport. Dulles Airport should be upgraded (I can’t believe that Dulles doesn’t have underground trains to the gates) and renamed (the Dulles brothers were murdering thieves). The aircraft accident came from a flawed and dangerous system. If some politicians had died on the CRJ flight, changes would occur.

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Canary In a Covid World

 

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