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Thanks, John Smith. 

Bill Astore

 

The post The Department of Empire appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Reason

 

The post Should sharing information about Israeli businesses get you 20 years in prison? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The New Arab

 

The post Israel TV producer calls for ‘Gaza holocaust, gas chambers’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The post John Rich Shares the Conversation That Got Trump to Stop Talking About the COVID Vaccine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Maureen McKerracher.

See here.

 

The post The Forgotten Power of Holy Water appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post With US Backing, Israel Set To Ethnically Cleanse Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

Si fa sempre più chiaro il motivo per cui l'Europa ha fretta di avviare l'euro digitale. L'ironia, qui, è che nonostante tale fretta la burocrazia europea verrà travolta lo sesso dalla velocità con cui corre l'evoluzione tecnologica statunitense in campo monetario. Infatti l'euro digitale servirà inizialmente a togliere quote di mercato a Visa/Mastercard, imponendo indirettamente dazi agli USA. Poi ci sono le perdite della BCE che sono salite a €7,8 miliardi e l'Autorità Monetaria Europea ha fatto registrare la seconda perdita consecutiva, mentre i titoli di stato in Europa sono crollati di nuovo nei primi due mesi di quest'anno. La BCE ha bisogno di un euro digitale per cancellare la sua politica disastrosa dell'ultimo decennio. Poi c'è la fiducia nella linea di politica della BCE che sta diminuendo, i titoli di stato non sono più un asset di riserva e le aspettative d'inflazione aumentano. La fretta di imporre l'euro digitale arriva anche in un momento in cui gli stati europei hanno annunciato ingenti piani di spesa, indebitamento e investimenti nella difesa. Pertanto l'euro digitale sarà fondamentale per imporre l'uso dell'euro come valuta, espandere il controllo sui cittadini e mascherare gli squilibri fiscali con uno strumento pericoloso emesso da un'istituzione monetaria che ha perso gran parte della sua credibilità negli ultimi cinque anni. C'è un altro motivo importante per accelerare con l'introduzione dell'euro digitale: le banche centrali e le società d'investimento globali temono che gli stati europei confischino i beni della banca centrale russa, creando un precedente pericoloso che potrebbe avere ripercussioni sui beni di altre nazioni extraeuropee. Poiché i fondi esteri che temono la confisca potrebbero abbandonare il sistema finanziario europeo, l'euro digitale potrebbe rivelarsi uno strumento utile per imporre l'uso della valuta anche in caso di calo della domanda. In sintesi, la Banca centrale europea non vuole accelerare l'introduzione dell'euro digitale a causa della crescente domanda dei cittadini, ma perché teme che il suo status di emittente di valuta possa svanire e quindi deve erigere controlli dei capitali per impedire la loro continua fuga oltreoceano.

____________________________________________________________________________________

da Zerohedge

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-nuovo-esercito-dellue-e-il-colpo)

Un tempo, per le persone della buona società, era piuttosto comune dire “immaginate se le donne governassero il mondo... avremmo sicuramente meno guerre, giusto?”. Sbagliato. Le donne governano il mondo, beh, almeno quello dell'Unione Europea. Tre donne, per la precisione: Ursula von der Leyen, Presidente della Commissione europea, Annalena Baerbock, Ministro degli esteri tedesco e, ultima ma non meno importante, l'Alta rappresentante per gli affari esteri dell'UE, Kaja Kallas. E cosa hanno in comune tutte e tre queste donne, a parte il fatto di avere nomi che ricordano malattie sessualmente trasmissibili? Tutte vogliono la guerra.

In linea con le decisioni sbagliate prese fin dall'inizio della guerra in Ucraina, e le sanzioni alla Russia sono in cima alla lista delle idee più stupide, l'UE ha una sola via d'uscita in Ucraina: deve uscirne senza dare l'impressione di aver perso, a qualunque costo. Il progetto UE è molto simile a un anziano in bicicletta che procede molto lentamente lungo una pista ciclabile olandese. Il timore delle élite dell'UE è che se cade dalla bici, non potrà mai più risalirci. La preoccupazione costante dei massimi esponenti dell'UE è che se quest'ultima perde il suo slancio in termini di copertura mediatica e rilevanza in generale, una pausa – qualsiasi pausa – potrebbe essere devastante. Questo, forse vi sorprenderà, è ciò che gli stessi funzionari dell'UE mi hanno confidato quando ero di stanza nella capitale belga. Un'espressione del genere dà un'idea di quanta poca fiducia l'UE abbia in se stessa come progetto valido, stabile e a lungo termine.

E così la follia è degenerata fino al punto in cui vengono prosciugati i portafogli e le borse dei contribuenti più poveri per finanziare il giocattolo sessuale dell'UE per eccellenza: un esercito europeo.

L'idea non è nuova. Come concetto, è vecchio quanto il mondo, dato che i federalisti più intransigenti di Bruxelles sostengono da almeno vent'anni che l'UE debba avere un proprio esercito, ma finora non ci sono riusciti. Il motivo principale per cui l'idea non ha preso piede è che ha creato troppi problemi politici con cui l'UE non è riuscita a fare i conti. In poche parole, c'era sempre il rischio di una nuova crisi politica che un esercito europeo avrebbe creato, con gli stati membri che litigavano su quale Paese avrebbe dovuto gestirlo, quale nazione ne fosse il capo, dove avrebbe avuto sede e come sarebbe stato gestito politicamente, in base a quale struttura decisionale (l'attuale Consiglio dell'UE, la Commissione UE, gli stessi stati membri in una nuova configurazione tramite i Ministeri della difesa). La preoccupazione è sempre stata che la Germania avrebbe avuto troppo potere e che questo avrebbe riaperta una vecchia ferita sul riarmo del Paese. E sappiamo tutti dove ha portato.

L'idea di un esercito europeo è in realtà più complicata di quanto si possa pensare. Uno dei motivi per cui non è mai decollata, nonostante diversi seri tentativi, è che sia l'UE che gli stati membri sono confusi e poco fiduciosi in un piano così audace. Sono letteralmente preoccupati che l'idea possa esplodere loro in faccia. È quello che gli americani chiamano “blowback”. No, non ha nulla a che fare con il Ministro degli esteri tedesco o con le insinuazioni riguardanti la sua persona. È un termine militare che indica quando un'arma spara un colpo che rimanda indietro l'energia in faccia al soldato, ferendo chi la impugna.

Per lungo tempo l'UE stessa ha voluto che l'esercito fosse in gran parte controllato da Bruxelles, ma sapeva che i pezzi grossi non l'avrebbero sopportato. E così, per loro, come per quelli della Commissione europea, si è trattato di cedere potere a un nuovo organismo, un nuovo livello di potere dell'UE, come se non ci fossero abbastanza istituzioni a Bruxelles che già sottraggono potere agli stati membri. L'atteggiamento era a dir poco controproducente: “Se noi (la Commissione) non creiamo questa entità, allora la Germania potrebbe farlo comunque da sola, e allora perderemo il potere” è la mentalità a Bruxelles. Infatti la Germania da almeno un decennio accarezza l'idea di avere un proprio esercito europeo, il che crea un vero grattacapo per Bruxelles, poiché conferisce un potere cruciale a uno stato membro che molti sostengono ne detenga già abbastanza. Il parlamento tedesco qualche anno fa ha fatto trapelare un documento che suggeriva un nuovo esercito internazionale gestito dalla Germania, che poi sarebbe stato inviato nelle zone calde del mondo e a cui si sarebbero uniti alcuni alleati con un ruolo di supporto.

Il problema è duplice:

1. Un buon numero di tedeschi sarebbe molto scontento di questa decisione e riterrebbe che alla Germania non dovrebbe mai essere consentito di tornare alla sua precedente potenza militare degli anni '30.
2. In una simile situazione l'UE ne soffrirebbe notevolmente, poiché metterebbe in luce la propria debolezza e sottolineerebbe l'inefficacia di Bruxelles, dato che non avrebbe alcun vantaggio militare e che uno stato membro avrebbe adottato una politica geomilitare ribelle.

E così si presentano due scenari: 

1. La Germania come attore principale di un esercito dell’UE creato e gestito da Bruxelles – almeno in apparenza;
2. Berlino gestisce il proprio esercito dell'UE, che non viene chiamato esercito dell'UE ma che il resto del mondo considera tale.

Nessuno di questi scenari favorisce realmente l'UE.

Ma sembra che questo sia proprio ciò che queste tre donne abbiano in mente.

Ecco perché hanno posto così tanta enfasi sulla necessità di reperire €800 miliardi tra i contributi degli stati membri dell'UE, in modo che l'Unione abbia un distintivo e il suo centro di potere sia Bruxelles. Francia, Germania, Italia, Polonia e Regno Unito faranno parte di questo nuovo, scintillante pilastro UE della NATO. Eppure è il ruolo della Gran Bretagna, considerato cruciale, che manderà in frantumi il sogno a occhi aperti dell'UE. Per molti versi il piano di queste tre donne segue la conferenza dell'anno scorso voluta da Macron per creare una coalizione di stati membri dell'UE, più il Regno Unito, che intervenisse nelle grandi questioni di politica estera nel mondo. La spesa per la difesa e l'invio di un esercito europeo – che includesse Regno Unito e Turchia – in luoghi in cui l'UE si sentiva di poter mostrare i muscoli facevano parte dell'intero piano.

Che queste tre streghe escogitino un piano così macabro per far fuori Macron e la sua grande idea è a dir poco preoccupante, a livelli shakespeariani. È difficile dire, al momento in cui scrivo, se si tratti di un piano reale, visto che è già stato bloccato dai Paesi Bassi, o di un piano sulla carta, studiato per impressionare Trump in un momento critico riguardo i negoziati. L'UE crede che questi colloqui possano protrarsi per mesi, forse anche un anno o più, e quindi inviare qualche centinaio di carri armati in più a Kiev per rafforzare la credibilità sia di Zelensky che dell'UE? Possibile. I carri armati sono stati costruiti? No.

Un'arguta opinionista di RT ha espresso in modo piuttosto divertente il suo parere sul ruolo del Regno Unito, affermando che la capacità di Londra di essere un attore militare globale è lontana anni luce dalla realtà.

“Il segretario alla Difesa britannico sostiene che la necessità di una corsa agli armamenti derivi in realtà da un profondo senso di hippy interiore”, ha scritto Rachel Marsden.

“Gli ucraini vogliono la pace. Tutti noi vogliamo la pace. E come ministri della Difesa, abbiamo discusso e stiamo lavorando per rafforzare la spinta per la pace, ha detto John Healey, probabilmente impaziente di tornare a casa per infilarsi pantaloni a zampa d'elefante e suonare i bongo”.

Mi ha ricordato lo spettacolo satirico di marionette degli anni '80 nel Regno Unito chiamato “Spitting Images”, il quale raffigurava Ronald Reagan mentre mormorava: “Vogliamo la pace... un pezzo di Nicaragua, un pezzo di El Salvador”.

E poi cosa c'è di sbagliato nei pantaloni a zampa d'elefante?

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

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

On Gail Appel wrote:

A disaster of Europes own device.

See here.

 

The post Europe’s Blackouts Are a Warning to America appeared first on LewRockwell.

The United States government claims that the United States of America, is a single sovereign nation;  while likewise claiming that it was always a national union, from 1776 onward.

But this was indeed never true; as every state was always a separate sovereign nation unto itself.

In reality, the American Revolution established the states as thirteen sovereign nations, by law, as originally declared in 1776:

And thereafter, every state was officially established as a separate sovereign nation under the 1783 Treaty of Paris:

…and the treaty was with the individual states as thirteen separate sovereign nations (i.e. “free, sovereign and independent states); it was not with the United States as a single nation.

Rather, in 1783, the United States was simply an international confederation of separate sovereign natio ns,  as formed in 1781:

And this confederation simply served as an international proxy for the thirteen fully-sovereign states; in dealing with foreign states, persuant to these “powers, jurisdictions and rights” that the states simply delegated to this confederation.

Meanwhile in 1787, the Constitution did not change any state’s national sovereignty– and the United States government does not claim such (which would be indeed strange, by effectively claiming that thirteen sovereign nations, each willingly gave up its national sovereignty, in order to lawfully subject itself to the utter mercy of the other twelve  in forming domestic policy against it– including Total War).

Rather, beginning in 1832; the United States government began to simply re-write history; with Andrew Jackson being the first sitting president to officially claim that the states had  never thirteen separate sovereign nations.

Instead, Jackson claimed that the individual thirteen states had always formed a national union, from 1776 onward– and that they were legally dependent states to it, not independent:

Here, by his phrase “a joint, not by several acts,” Jackson refers to the Declaration of Independence, as an “act” which allegedly formed a single sovereign nation. Meanwhile by “the terms of our confederation”, Jackson likewise refers to the Articles of Confederation (in which each state expressly retained its sovereignty, freedom and independence; but which Jackson still claims that they never had).

And the Congress concurred with Jackson in 1833, by passing his “Force Bill,”  which set federal precedent for authorizing military force against individual states.

This sentiment was repeated during the Lincoln Administration; with President Lincoln expressly claiming that the states had never been 13 sovereign nations, in order to claim “national union” over them:

And in 1869, the Supreme Court repeated this sentiment, likewise claiming that the states had never formed an international union of separate sovereign nations:

And thus, the United States government wielded the claim of national union over the states, from that point forward.

Accordingly in 2012,  when Daniel Miller of the Texas Nationalist Movement, petitioned President Barack Obama  2012 for the recognition of Texas as a separate sovereign nation;  the Obama White House issued the following response:

However as noted above, the United States government made no valid legal argument of national union over any state; while the original sovereignty of the individual states is irrefutable, as documented above).

Rather, we see that, legally:

• the United States was simply always an international union of separate sovereign nations (such as that of the UN, or the EU);  but that
• the United States government  has simply gone rogue, after launching a coup to seize power over the sovereign nations which are parties to it, under a false claim of “national union.”

But legally, this coup does not alter or revoke any state’s national sovereignty, to form a national union where none exists by law.

On the contrary: each state remains a separate sovereign nation, by law; and thus remains under the proper supreme authority of its respective people. Meanwhile the United States government, is simply a hostile occupier thereof, with no sovereign power whatever, under any law.

Therefore,  an individual state,  simply needs to prove and claim its proper long-standing sovereignty; , in order for the state to lawfully resume it. (The full petition is here.)

In conclusion, therefore: the United States government has been perpetrating an epic scandal against the American People (i.e. of the individual American states) for over 150 years; which has now been exposed.

The post Every American State Is a Fully Sovereign Nation appeared first on LewRockwell.

There really is no reasoning with Trump fanboys when it comes to the reality of his policies. They will spin anything and everything to portray Trump‘s blatant anti-freedom and anti-market policies as secret crypto-libertarianism. It’s all 1000-D chess, you see.

The latest bogus narrative of this sort comes from one of my readers who is convinced that Trump is right in denouncing those central bankers who inflate too little. The reader objects to my Wednesday column which says that Trump has now surpassed Powell when it comes to pushing bad monetary policy.

The reader informs me that easy-money policy is a good thing and he says the Fed should implement a “25-basis-point cuts as quickly as possible” and that we need the central bank to set interest rates because we can’t “trust banks to rationally set interest rates on their own.”

That’s not happening because, according to the reader, “the word on the street is that Jerome Powell is part of the deep state cabal and is keeping rates high just to screw Trump.”

This statement is nonsense in at least two ways. First of all, the Fed doesn’t “keep interest rates high.” If the Fed didn’t exist, there is about a 99.99% chance that interest rates would be higher than they are. Contrary to the idea that the Fed is “setting” interest rates at “too high” levels, one of the primary jobs of the Fed (nowadays) is to keep interest rates lower than they would be in a free market. The Fed is doing exactly this. Through its regular open market operations, the Fed intervenes in the market to keep the federal funds rate within the target window (which is 4.25% to 4.5%). If the Fed were simply to do nothing, it’s almost guaranteed that interest rates would rise. So, it’s highly misleading to ever say that the Fed “is keeping interest rates high.” Rather, if interest rates are rising, it is far more accurate to say “the Fed is forcing down interest rates less than usual.”

Secondly, the reader isn’t even right that Powell, et al, are taking a hawkish approach “to screw Trump.” Now, it’s entirely possible that Powell wants to screw Trump, but Powell certainly hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for doing so through actual monetary policy. Rather, contrary to the reader’s non-factual theory, Powell actually adopted more dovish policy in February when he and the FOMC backed off their earlier targets for shrinking the balance sheet. Shrinking the balance sheet is a policy tool that is essentially equivalent to allowing interest rates to rise. By slowing the balance sheet runoff, as Powell did recently, he is doing the equivalent of pushing down interest rates. In other words, Powell’s policy is relatively dovish, and the reader seems unaware of the how the Fed is using its balance sheet.

(We might also note that this inflationary capitulation on balance sheet policy comes after several months of cuts to the target interest rate continuing the dovish policy of late 2024. The idea that the Fed has become anti-inflationary—whether it’s to make Trump look bad or not— is fantasy.)

Indeed, the very existence of the balance sheet (which contains trillions of dollars’ worth of MBS and Treasury assets) is evidence that the Fed is very much invested in artificially lowering interest rates and is not “keeping interest rates high” at all. After all, the Fed bought up those trillions in assets during the Covid Panic and during the GFC for the specific purpose of lowering interest rates and increasing the money supply. Every day that the balance sheet continues to have trillions in assets on it is another day that the Fed is actively intervening to keep interest rates low.

If the Fed were to dump its trillions in assets, an enormous amount of monetary deflation would set in and interest rates would rise substantially. That’s not happening, and Powell is actually working to slow that process.

So, Trump fanboys, I’m sorry that the Fed isn’t pumping the money enough to suit you in your quest to create an inflation-fueled illusion of a strong economy while Trump raises taxes and plows ahead with trillions in deficit spending. If Trump were smart, he’d want a severe recession to clean out all the garbage malinvestments that have arisen over the past 15 years on the back of relentless monetary inflation. There would then be time to build a firmer foundation for a real non-bubble economy before the next presidential election. But, Trump apparently doesn’t understand the problem of inflationary business cycles, or he doesn’t care, and thinks only in terms of short-term, soundbyte policy.

Unfortunately, though, Trump has succeeded in convincing his disciples that now the problem with the central bank is that it’s not inflationist enough. His plan has worked brilliantly. For example, note this recent tweet from InfoWars:

For the Alex Jones crowd, central bank fiat money is now good! The only problem with the central bank now, it seems, is that it is “private.” (That latter claim isn’t even true, as it is abundantly clear the central bank is effectively an organ of the US Treasury, and the Board of Governors is both a de facto and de jure government agency.)

But this is just the latest example of the rhetorical gymnastics Trump supporters will do to explain away how they completely reverse their positions if Trump says so. After many years of publishing articles denouncing the Fed for its paper money and its impoverishing inflation, suddenly Alex Jones wants the Fed to inflate more.

InfoWars declares the Fed “Tries to Crash US Economy.” Like Trump, InfoWars has now adopted the rhetoric of Wall Street easy-money addicts who call for more money pumping lest the central bank “crash the economy” through a “policy error.” Jones might as well have Jamie Dimon and Ben Bernanke his show to push the inflationist narrative, since Info Wars has now made its peace with Fed inflation. Trump fans will tell us it’s 10,000-D chess!

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

The post No, Powell Is Not ‘Keeping Interest Rates High’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Note: one of my favorite things about publishing on Substack is that I can continually revise articles as I learn new information (e.g., much has been added to the existing DMSO articles). As such, I periodically republish revised versions of the articles readers here found to be the most helpful and it is my aim to eventually unmask each of the commonly prescribed drugs that cause a lot of problems.

The years I have spent studying the medical industry have made me appreciate how often economic principles can allow one to understand its complex and contradictory behavior. For example, I believe many of the inconsistencies in medical ethics (e.g., “mothers have an absolute right to abort their children” and “mothers cannot refuse to vaccinate their children because it endangers their child’s life”) can be explained by simply acknowledging that whatever makes money is deemed “ethical.”

Sales Funnels

In my eyes, one of the most important business principles for understanding medicine are sales funnels, a method of selling products where you initially cast a wide net, and then successively cast smaller nets for increasingly expensive products after catching your initial customers.
Note: the term “funnels” is used to describe how the sales pipeline gets narrower as you move to more expensive products.

I typically see two types of (often overlapping) sales funnels in medicine.

The first works by normalizing giving an “innocuous” drug to broad swathes of people and then selling increasingly expensive pharmaceutical drugs to treat the complications many experience from those drugs. One of the most insidious ones affects many of our girls and is one I’ve repeatedly tried to draw attention to:

Note: a good case can be made that many of the chronic illnesses our children suffer from now (which are very lucrative to “treat”) are a direct consequence of the ever increasing number of vaccines in the marketplace.

The second funnel works by recasting “preventative medicine” and “promoting health” as the task of screening for each person for conditions they are at risk for. The results from these universal screenings are then used to justify selling them medical services (e.g., drug prescriptions). Once that screening becomes normalized, the industry will then pivot to expanding the funnel and having far more services be sold. For example:

•What constitutes a “safe” blood pressure has been continually lowered, and as a result, more and more people are put on blood pressure medications. This in turn has created a variety of problems (discussed further here). For example, the elderly (due to the arteries calcifying with age) need a higher blood pressure for blood to reach the brain, and many hence suffer lightheadedness and catastrophic falls from their blood pressure being lowered.

•Since we started mass cholesterol screenings, what constitutes a “safe” cholesterol has also been continually lowered by the corrupt committees who create the guidelines doctors follow to practice medicine. For example, a widely used calculator which determines ones risk of a stroke or heart attack consistently concludes people are at a high risk of a heart attack and must urgently start statins, yet almost no doctor in practice knows that a 2016 study of 307,591 Americans discovered the calculator overestimates their risk by 5-6 times. Similarly, most doctors aren’t aware that beyond failing to benefit patients (in contrast to natural therapies which do improve heart disease), statins are also immensely dangerous drugs (discussed further here).

Note: the folly of this approach is highlighted by a trial which found removing on average 2.8 non-essential drugs from the elderly at one facility caused their 1 year death rate to go from 45%-21% and their hospitalizations that year to go from 30%-11.8%. As far as I know, there is no intervention on the market which offers a benefit comparable to this.

Radiographic Screenings

One of the common ways mass screenings are done is through giving lots of patients X-rays and then funneling those with abnormal imaging into being treated.

For example, women over the age of 50 are advised to get a mammogram every two years so that their deadly breast cancers can be identified and the women can be saved through early treatment for the cancers. However, whenever these screening programs are studied, they are found to not provide a net benefit because:
•Fast growing cancers (the ones you want to catch) will rarely be in the early stage at the exact same time someone gets a mammogram. Conversely, these cancers are normally noticed by doctors or patients (due to the sudden changes they create) and hence are radiographically evaluated independently of the mass screening programs.
•Slow growing cancers (which are unlikely to endanger women) are typically the ones which get caught.
•False positives are quite common with mammograms.
•A positive mammogram result is extremely psychologically stressful and frequently results in a variety of harmful treatments being performed on the women (e.g., having their breasts removed).

Peter Gøtzsche in turn conducted an exhaustive review of the evidence on routine mammogram screening which should have ended the practice (it can be read here). However, his data (which was widely publicized) had no effect on these screening programs. Many (myself included) believe that was because radiologists make so much money from mammograms they have an inherent need to justify the necessity of this routine screening.
Note: many medical specialists depend upon repeatedly performing the same billable service (e.g., vaccinating a child, performing a female pelvic exam, or reading a mammogram).

DEXA Scams

Another universal screening practice for women are dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scans, which calculate the density of bones and hence are believed to be a proxy for bone strength. It is then compared to the average bone density of a 30 year old, and a statistical method is applied to determine how far away their density is from that value which then produces their T-score. Every medical student in turn is taught that a T-score of 0 to -1 is normal, -1 to -2.5 is on the way to being bad (osteopenia) and a T-score that is -2.5 or worse means your bones are weak enough that you have osteoporosis and must urgently begin treatment for it.

If you take a step back, a few questions should come to mind.

First, since bones naturally become less dense with age, most people will have bones that are less dense than those of a 30 year old. In turn, the current of management of osteoporosis accepts that bone loss is inevitable and reasonably tries to prevent that loss early on since it is so much harder to regain it later in life.

Hence, many people due to the normal process of aging will have osteopenia or osteoporosis. Consider for example what this study concluded was the average T-score by age of Italians.

Note: if, for instance, the average T-score for a group is -2.5, this will mean a lot of people within that group (half of them) will have a score below -2.5 and conversely, at lower “averages” even more will have osteoporosis. Additionally, T-scores are calculated utilizing the standard deviation of the bone densities in 30 year olds, a value which can be up to 50% smaller than that of older adults (making it much easier to pass the -2.5 threshold).

Second, how accurate are the scans? As it turns out, there is actually a great deal of variance in DEXA scan results depending on which machine is used, how the operator performs the test and what bones are measured, with studies often finding a 5-6% difference in bone density depending on where the test was done. More importantly, since the T-score is based off standard deviations, a 5-6% difference in bone density can, in turn, change the T-score by 0.2-0.4 (which equates to a decade of bone loss) and hence tip many over to an osteoporosis diagnosis.
Note: a similar issue exists with blood pressure, as the stress of being a doctors office often creates enough of a BP elevation for people to be erroneously diagnosed with hypertension and started on blood pressure medications. This condition, in turn, is euphemistically known as “white coat hypertension,” applies to 15-30% of hypertension diagnoses, but rarely is corrected.

Third, is there any point to repeatedly doing them? As it turns out, a study of 4124 older women found that once an initial DEXA result was obtained, there was no additional information of use gained from repeating the study over the next 8 years. Nonetheless, many guidelines often recommend getting a scan every 1-2 years, and likewise, Medicare pays for one every 2 years. As these scans typically cost between $150 to $300, that quickly adds up.

Fourth, do the scans accurately reflect bone strength and the risk of fractures? While they are generally predictive of the risk, they are not as accurate as is commonly believed. For example, this study found the osteoporosis status of a patient (determined by their T-score) frequently did not match what was directly observed within bones under a microscope. Similarly, this study found that when bones were deliberately weakened, Dexa scans underestimated how much strength had been lost.

Note: a cheaper method of diagnosing bone strength (which does not expose patients to ionizing radiation) is beginning to be used in Europe. It works by sending ultrasound waves into bone and then analyzing the spectrum created by those waves to assess the health of the bones. As the attached presentation shows, it accurately predicts bone density, and additionally, predicts bone strength. In short, this may be a dramatically superior approach to Dexa scans, but it is unlikely we will see it enter regular use in the United States for at least a decade due to how heavily invested many already are in performing Dexa scans.

Note: the story above in the comment is discussed in more detail in this NPR article. Additionally, after publishing this article, I learned that of a 2011 book that exposed the DEXA scam and provides many more compelling references arguing against their diagnosis.

Bisphosphonates

Once a patient is diagnosed with osteoporosis (and in some cases after an osteopenia diagnosis), the first line treatment is to start a bisphosphonate and continue it for up to 3-5 years depending on if the drug is administered intravenously or orally.

Note: the bisphosphonates include: Alendronate (Fosamax), Risedronate (Actonel), Ibandronate (Boniva), Zoledronic Acid (Reclast), Zoledronate (Zometa, Aclasta) Pamidronate (Aredia) Etidronate (Didronel), Neridronate (Nerixia), Tiludronate (Skelid), Clodronate (Bonefos, Loron)

A variety of factors influence the development of bone. Two of the most important ones are the cells that build bone up (osteoblasts) and the cells that break bone down (osteoclasts). Bisphosphonates in turn concentrate in the bone and work by disabling or killing osteoclasts. This thus leads to bone density increasing because the balance of bone production shifts towards building them up rather than breaking them down.

Unfortunately, there are two problems with this approach.

1. Bisphosphonates are notorious for having a large number of side effects. Commonly recognized ones include:

• Irritating the stomach and inflaming or eroding the esophagus (which can sometimes lead to esophageal cancer). This side effect is common enough that it leads many patients to not want to continue the drugs.
• Severe bone, muscle and joint pain throughout the body.
• Osteonecrosis (death of bone tissue) within the jaw. Since so many people have been affected by this (e.g., Kaiser found 0.1% of users were affected), class action lawsuits have been filed against the manufacturers for this debilitating illness (which revealed Merck’s private discussions about it). This appears to be a result of bisphosphonates concentrating in the jaw reducing the jaw’s ability to repair itself by around 90%. Remarkably, the American Dental Association even cautions its members to avoid working on patients who are taking a bisphosphonate (presumably due to the liability created by their increased risk of harm from a dental surgery).
• Triggering flu like symptoms when injected.
• Occasionally causing unusual fractures in the hips.
• Roughly doubling one’s risk for atrial fibrillation
• Low blood calcium levels (hypocalcemia can often be quite problematic).
• Fatigue, nausea and lack of strength.
• Declining kidney function.
• Inflammation of the eyes.
• Poor healing of bones after fractures.
• Increased risk of fractures
  Note: this is an understandably controversial side effect fraught with conflicting evidence, given that its the opposite of what the drug is supposed to do, but there is now enough evidence that it is acknowledged these drugs increase the risk of certain types of fractures.

To illustrate, a January 2008 FDA alert, warned physicians that all bisphosphonates may cause:

severe and sometimes incapacitating bone, joint, and/or muscle (musculoskeletal) pain . . . [which] may occur within days, months, or years after starting the medication, and in some patients, may not resolve even after discontinuing the medicine.

Note: we also find a variety of other significant issues occur. For example, we’ve seen many patients on bisphosphonates develop bone spurs in the jaw (which can be quite challenging for them to deal with). Similarly, a study of individuals who have had fractures after 3-8 years of bisphosphonate usage discovered that they had almost no new bone formation occurring.

2. The way bisphosphonates work is very different to how the body was designed to build healthy bone, and in effect, much of the bone they leave you with is “old bone.”

Note: a variety of other newer drugs exist to treat osteoporosis. These drugs are often more effective at producing stronger bones, and often don’t have the same significant side effects seen with the bisphosphonates, so quite a few of my colleagues use them. Unfortunately, those drugs tend to be much more expensive and each one still has its own set of side effects.

Physiologic Momentum

One of the most remarkable aspects of the human body is its ability to gradually adapt to whatever circumstances it finds itself in. Conversely, one of the primary challenges one faces when dealing with a chronic illness is that typically by the time the symptoms of the disease emerge, the maladaptive physiologic process that gave rise to those symptoms is firmly established within the body and hence quite difficult (and time consuming) to shift.

For example, Alzheimer’s disease typically is a result of the processes which create neurons slowing down and being outpaced by the processes that destroy them, hence leading to an increasing neuronal loss and an increasing loss of neurological function. In turn, the only method which has ever been proven to treat Alzheimer’s is to simply reverse that equation and have neuronal production outpace neuronal destruction. Unfortunately, since a drug can’t be made to do that (rather it requires changing one’s lifestyle) the industry has instead relentlessly focused on drugs which eliminate the plaque the brain forms to protect its neurons from injury. Thus all we have to show after decades of spending billions each year to find a cure for this disease are expensive plaque targeting that have a wide range of side effects and are useless for actually treating Alzheimer’s disease.

One of the most important adaptive processes in the body is how it accommodates to the stresses and loads placed upon it. For example, the reason why weight training “works” is because muscles being stressed through overexertion gives a signal to the body that it needs to build more muscle.

However, while the adaptive process with muscles is frequently recognized, many others are not. For instance, the body continually remodels the soft tissue which connects the body together, and as a result, when someone experiences a pharmaceutical injury which damages the body’s ability to rebuild those tissues, they are likely to subsequently experience a critical structural failure.

This is most well known with the fluoroquinolone antibiotics, as the drugs (which have a high degree of toxicity to the mitochondria that fuel tissue buildup in the body) frequently cause tendon ruptures to occur over a month after the drugs are stopped. Similarly, we also observe many of the other more dangerous drugs on the market over time (even if stopped) will cause the soft tissue of the body to become compromised (often to a degree which significantly impacts the patient’s life), which in part may be explained by the fact the cells that create connective tissue have abundant mitochondria.
Note: a more detailed discussion of the treatments for ligamentous laxity (hypermobility is a condition that disproportionately affects the individuals who are the most sensitive to their environment and being injured by pharmaceuticals) can be found here.

Bone Remodeling

An adaptive process also continually reshapes the bones so that their architecture is arranged to optimally bear the loads placed upon them. In most cases, we never think about this process because it just works as intended. However, in certain cases, we do recognize where it has gone awry.

For example, since the bones depend upon the weight of gravity for the signal to be built up (via the electrical currents that are created when bone is compressed), that signal is lost in low gravity environments. Because of this, a longstanding problem in space travel was the rapid bone loss astronauts experienced (e.g., in 6 months they lost 6-10% of their bone density, which put them at a high risk for fractures once they returned to normal gravity and typically took 3 or more years to recover from).

Because of this, while we typically only focus on the cells which build bone, the reality is that the osteoclasts are also immensely important, as their destruction of bone is what allows bone to assume the shape which best allows it to effectively bare the weight of gravity. In turn, when they are blocked by a bisphosonate, bone density increases, but the bones that form are much more brittle and inflexible. Our dislike of those drugs in turn comes about from how frequently we encounter the pathologic changes they create in our patient’s bones (e.g., we find that while compressive strength may be increased, bone mobility is not, and that is often far more consequential for the patients).

This in turn highlights a common problem in medicine. Frequently doctors are trained to focus on treating numbers (e.g., reducing a “high” cholesterol) under the belief that correcting those numbers creates health. Much of this comes from the fact it’s much easier to conduct a study that assesses benefit through the change of a value which is assumed to be good (e.g., a vaccine creating the target antibodies) than it is to evaluate if an actual improvement occurs for patients (e.g., a decrease in the total number of people who died—which in Pfizer’s studies did not occur despite the fact “lifesaving” antibodies were consistently being produced).

In short I would argue that while bisphonates may be effective at improving a DEXA score, they aren’t necessarily good at improving health.

Read the Whole Article

The post What We Aren’t Told About Osteoporosis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Artificial Intelligence is not a new concept in computer science. It goes back to the earliest days of digital computing. There have been multiple generations of ‘AI’ as it is frequently called. None of these amounted to anything but losses. The microprocessors were too slow, the memory too small and disk space so limited it bordered on useless. Things have changed dramatically with the advent of cloud computing which is based on low cost 64 bit Intel, AMD, and Arm CPU’s using very large disk arrays in the cloud thanks to very cheap terabyte disks and high performance graphic processing units (GPU) from Nvidia; now one of the most valuable companies in the world. None of this required the government. It is a perfect case of private capital serving the free market. It seems to be ubiquitous now; loved by the IT community for the incredible tools now available and cursed by those who think it will take everyone’s job away, enslave humanity and perhaps launch a thermonuclear war ala the Terminator.

Sadly for the venture capital crowd it is still a money losing sinkhole with the sunk costs now in the tens of billions instead of the old days when it failed losing only millions. The biggest names are OpenAI, xAI, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Hugging Face and Microsoft Copilot (based on OpenAI) all that produce nothing but red ink.

ChatGPT is my new best friend. We ‘chat’ almost every day and it is free. A chat at its simplest is question and response. You can run ChatGPT from a web browser, a program on your PC, Mac or Android desktop computer. It also has an application for the iPhone and Android smart phones. If you pay $20 a month you get expanded capabilities but even these are mainly free for some part of every day. It understands many languages including computer programming languages. Thanks to the vast amount of data available on the Internet the dialogs can be very interesting.

I love to discuss Austrian Economic Theory with ChatGPT. It understands it at the most profound level something mainstream economists, government leaders including our elected leaders either do not or refuse to. In a quick dialect it shows clearly the Austrian way to peace and freedom. Here’s a short dialog I had today with ChatGPT illuminating this. My questions will be in fixed width Courier font which is what teletype terminals used for decades!

Question: briefly explain Austrian Economic Theory.

Austrian economic theory emphasizes individual action, subjective value, and free markets. It rejects mathematical modeling and central planning, focusing instead on how individuals make decisions based on personal preferences and limited information.

Key principles include:

• Methodological individualism: All economic phenomena arise from individual choices.
• Subjective theory of value: Value is determined by individual preferences, not labor or intrinsic properties.
• Marginalism: Economic decisions are made at the margin—what matters is the next unit of a good or service.
• Spontaneous order: Markets self-organize through voluntary exchange without central direction.
• Business cycle theory: Credit expansion by central banks distorts interest rates, causing booms and inevitable busts (Mises-Hayek theory).

Austrian economists generally oppose government intervention, arguing it disrupts the natural coordination of market forces.

Would you like a contrast with Keynesian or Chicago school economics?

Question. No. Explain currency?

In Austrian economics, currency (money) is viewed as a market-originating tool, not something that should be created or managed by governments. Key views include:

• Sound money: Austrians strongly support commodity-backed money (like gold or silver), believing it limits inflation and government overreach.
• Against fiat currency: They argue fiat money—created by central banks without commodity backing—leads to inflation, asset bubbles, and economic distortions.
• No central banking: They advocate for free banking, where banks issue their own currencies backed by real assets, competing in the market.
• Money as a medium of exchange: Austrians see money as a neutral medium that emerges spontaneously from trade, not as a tool for macroeconomic policy.

Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard were especially vocal about the dangers of inflationary fiat currency and central banking (e.g., the Federal Reserve).

Would you like a deeper dive into their critique of central banks?

Question: yes.

Austrian economists offer a fundamental critique of central banks, especially the Federal Reserve, rooted in the belief that centralized control of money leads to economic instability, distortion of prices, and erosion of individual liberty. Here’s a concise breakdown:

Key Austrian Critiques of Central Banks

1. Distortion of Interest Rates

• Central banks artificially lower interest rates via monetary expansion.
• Austrians argue interest rates should emerge from real savings and time preference.
• Artificially low rates mislead entrepreneurs, triggering malinvestment (bad investments) during the boom phase of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT).

2. Boom and Bust Cycles

• When credit is cheap and abundant (due to central bank policy), it fuels unsustainable economic booms.
• Once reality catches up (e.g., unsustainable debt, resource misallocation), a bust follows.
• The 2008 financial crisis is often cited by Austrians as a modern example.

3. Inflation and Currency Devaluation

• Printing money to finance deficits (or stimulate growth) dilutes the value of currency.
• Austrians see this as a hidden tax that erodes purchasing power, especially harming savers and the poor.
• They argue inflation is not “too much growth” but too much money chasing the same goods.

4. Moral Hazard and Crony Capitalism

• Central banks bail out large institutions (“too big to fail”), encouraging reckless behavior and consolidating power among elites.
• This fosters crony capitalism, where politically connected firms survive while competitive ones fail.

5. Lack of Price Signals

• By controlling money and credit, central banks distort market signals, undermining efficient resource allocation.
• Free-market Austrians believe accurate prices can only emerge in a decentralized, undistorted market.

Bottom Line

Austrians argue that central banking:

• Undermines economic stability,
• Destroys the integrity of money,
• Encourages systemic risk and inequality.

Instead, they favor:

• Free banking, where banks issue their own competing currencies,
• A return to sound money, ideally backed by gold or another hard asset.

Would you like a historical example, like the Fed during the Great Depression or 2008 crisis?

Question: No, but I do want you to list the financial crises and inflation since 1913 the birth of the fed.

Financial Crises Since 1913

1. 1913–1920: WWI Inflation & Recession

• Fed expands money supply to fund war.
• Post-war inflation (1917–1920) >15% annually.
• Sharp deflation and recession followed in 1920–1921.

2. 1929–1939: The Great Depression

• Stock market crash (1929).
• GDP fell nearly 30%, unemployment peaked at 25%.
• Fed blamed for tightening money supply during initial collapse.

3. 1941–1945: WWII Inflation Controls

• Price controls and rationing to fight war-induced inflation.
• Suppressed official CPI, but black-market inflation persisted.

4. 1965–1982: The Great Inflation

• Loose monetary policy + Vietnam War + social spending.
• CPI inflation:
  • 6% avg (1965–1970),
  • 11%+ (1974–1975),
  • 13.5% (1980 peak).
• Fed under Paul Volcker raised rates >20% to break it (1981–82 recession).

5. 1987: Black Monday

• Dow Jones fell 22% in one day (Oct 19, 1987).
• No recession followed, but exposed fragility in financial system.

6. 1998: LTCM Collapse

• Hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management implodes.
• Fed organizes private bailout to prevent systemic risk.

7. 2000–2002: Dot-Com Bust

• Nasdaq crashes ~78% from 2000 peak.
• Fed lowers interest rates aggressively.

8. 2007–2009: Global Financial Crisis (GFC)

• Housing bubble fueled by ultra-low rates and loose credit.
• Lehman Brothers collapse (2008).
• Fed initiates massive Quantitative Easing (QE) and bailouts.

9. 2020: COVID-19 Crash

• Stock market dropped ~30% in a month (March 2020).
• Fed slashes rates to zero, launches trillions in asset purchases.

10. 2021–2023: Post-COVID Inflation

• Inflation rises to 9.1% (June 2022) — highest in 40+ years.
• Driven by stimulus, supply shocks, QE, and Fed balance sheet expansion.
• Fed begins aggressive tightening in 2022.

Major Inflation Episodes

Period Peak CPI Inflation Cause 1917–1920 ~20% WWI spending 1942–1945 ~10% WWII buildup 1973–1980 13.5% (1980) Oil shocks, Fed mismanagement 2021–2022 9.1% (2022) COVID stimulus + supply issues

–

Austrian economists argue these crises and inflation spikes are not random, but the direct result of Federal Reserve intervention in credit markets and manipulation of money.

Would you like this in a table format or want to expand on one of these periods?

Question: No. You forgot to include the war inflation of 2003 to 2024.

2003–2024: War Inflation and Monetary Expansion

Key Events & Drivers:

• Iraq & Afghanistan wars ($6–8 trillion estimated total cost).
• Massive deficit spending with little offset by taxation.
• Expansion of homeland security, military-industrial complex, and foreign aid.
• 2008 crisis triggered QE1–QE3 (2008–2014): trillions created to bail out banks and stimulate markets.
• Post-2008 asset inflation: Real estate, stocks, and wealth inequality rise sharply.
• COVID-19 (2020–2021): Trillions in stimulus deepen existing monetary distortion.
• 2022–2024: Inflation surge due to prior QE, disrupted supply chains, war in Ukraine, global food/energy shocks.

Inflation Profile:

• CPI remained deceptively low (under 3%) from 2009–2020, but:
  • Asset inflation: Home prices, stocks, and debt surged.
  • Shadow inflation: Shrinkflation, product quality decline, and healthcare/education cost spikes.
• 2021–2022: CPI spikes to 9.1% — Fed forced into historic rate hikes (2022–2023).

Austrian View:

• Entire period is a monetary illusion — real productivity masked by fiat expansion.
• Wars funded via inflationary credit, not taxation or savings — violating sound money principles.
• Massive misallocation of capital and dependence on central banking.
• Inflation was delayed, but inevitable due to decades of easy money.

This period may go down as the longest stealth inflation era in modern history, culminating in a sudden price shock once monetary distortions could no longer be hidden by productivity gains or asset inflation.

Would you like a full timeline combining this with earlier crises in a printable or tabular format?

Question: Yes

Year(s) Name / Description Key Causes Economic Impact 1819 Panic of 1819 End of War of 1812 boom, land speculation, tight credit First major U.S. peacetime depression; widespread bank failures 1837–1843 Panic of 1837 Jackson’s bank veto, end of Second Bank, speculative bubble 5-year depression; 40% of U.S. banks failed 1857 Panic of 1857 Railroad overexpansion, falling grain prices, bank failures Rapid but deep recession; hit Northern industry hardest 1873–1879 Panic of 1873 / Long Depression Collapse of Jay Cooke & Co., post-Civil War credit boom Global depression; 6 years of economic stagnation in U.S. 1884 Panic of 1884 Gold drain, collapse of two NY banks Short, sharp contraction in credit 1893–1897 Panic of 1893 Railroad overbuilding, silver/gold bimetallism crisis Severe depression; 500 banks & 15,000 businesses failed 1907 Panic of 1907 Stock market crash, lack of central liquidity Banking panic; J.P. Morgan intervened to avert collapse

–

Austrian & Historical Notes:

• Most panics were tied to speculative excess (especially railroads and land), banking instability, and sudden contraction of credit.
• Absence of a central bank meant localized collapses, but also faster corrections.
• These crises led to calls for a centralized lender of last resort, culminating in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

No government in the world fully follows Austrian economic theory for several interrelated political, institutional, and practical reasons. Here’s a structured speculative answer grounded in political economy:

1. Austrian Economics Imposes Hard Fiscal Limits

• Austrian theory rejects fiat money and government deficit spending.
• Governments rely heavily on debt financing, especially during crises (wars, recessions, pandemics).
• Adopting Austrian principles would force balanced budgets, meaning:
  • No stimulus spending,
  • No monetization of debt,
  • Severe constraints on welfare and military programs.
• Politicians are incentivized to spend and promise more than they tax to stay in power.

2. It Removes Monetary Tools That Central Banks Depend On

• Austrian theory opposes:
  • Central banking,
  • Interest rate targeting,
  • Quantitative easing,
  • Inflation targeting.
• Central banks are the core mechanism modern governments use to:
  • Stabilize markets,
  • Manage unemployment,
  • Respond to recessions.
• No modern state wants to give up the ability to “print” money or manage short-term economic variables.

3. Austrian Policy Benefits the Long Term, Not the Short Term

• Austrian policy is painful in the short run:
  • No bailouts,
  • No stimulus,
  • “Let bad businesses fail.”
• Voters and markets demand immediate relief, not long-term discipline.
• Austrian medicine often means austerity, liquidation, and deflation before recovery — politically toxic.

4. It Reduces Political Power

• Austrianism implies minimal government:
  • No central economic planning,
  • No regulatory discretion,
  • No socialized safety nets.
• Governments would shrink in scope and relevance, reducing power of bureaucracies, central banks, and legislatures.
• Political elites and corporate lobbyists benefit from interventionism and state-connected finance.

5. Global Finance Is Built on Fiat and Leverage

• Global capital markets are deeply intertwined with fiat currencies, fractional reserve banking, and central bank backstops.
• A shift to Austrian-style free banking or hard money (e.g. gold or Bitcoin) would:
  • Disrupt bond markets,
  • Collapse overleveraged institutions,
  • Force deleveraging on a global scale.
• Governments would lose control over monetary sovereignty.

6. Austrian Theory Is Philosophically Uncomfortable

• It’s not technocratic — it emphasizes subjective value, spontaneous order, and uncertainty.
• Mainstream economics favors models, equations, and control, while Austrians reject mathematical central planning.
• It challenges the very legitimacy of modern economic management.

 Summary

No government follows Austrian economics because it:

• Limits state power,
• Prevents monetary manipulation,
• Requires immediate economic pain for long-term gain,
• And removes tools politicians use to manage public perception.

In essence: Austrian economics is good economics, but bad politics.

Politics is the Art of the Deal which is a code for stealing from the public fisc by direct taxation and central bank inflation by giving the funds bilked to those that did not earn them. C’est la vie.

The post Chatting Austrian appeared first on LewRockwell.

This Trump transformation of America was intended to be rebuilt as America First.

The story, both on Ukraine and Iran, is that President Trump wants a ‘deal’ – and both deals are available – yet he seems nonetheless to have boxed himself in. Trump presents his Administration as being something rougher, meaner, and far less sentimental. It aspires to emerge, apparently, as also something more centralized, coercive, and radical.

In domestic policy, there may be some truth to this categorisation of the Trumpian ethos. In foreign policy, however, Trump tergiversates. The reason is not clear, but the fact of it clouds his prospects in the three areas vital to his ‘peace-maker’ aspiration – Ukraine, Iran and Gaza.

Whilst it is true that Trump’s true mandate derived from rampant economic and social discontent, rather than from his claims to be a peacemaker – yet the two key foreign policy ends remain important to maintaining momentum forward.

One possible answer is that in foreign negotiations, the President needs a grounded and experienced team to support him. And he does not have that.

In advance of sending his Envoy Witkoff to talk to President Putin, General Kellogg, it seems, presented Trump with a Versailles-type Armistice proposal: A vision of Russia on the ropes (i.e. the plan was cast in terms more appropriate to Russian capitulation). Kellogg’s proposal implied also that Trump would be doing Putin a ‘big favour’ – by condescending to offer him a ladder down which to climb from his perch up the Ukraine ‘tree’. And this was exactly the line Trump took in January:

Having stated that Russia had lost one million men (in the war), Trump then went on to say that “Putin is destroying Russia by not making a deal”. He further claimed that Russia’s economy was in ‘ruins’, and most notably, said that he would consider sanctioning or tariffing Russia. In a subsequent Truth Social post, he wrote, “I’m going to do Russia – whose Economy is failing – and President Putin, a very big FAVOR”.

The President – duly briefed by his team – may have imagined that he would offer Putin a unilateral ceasefire and, hey presto, would have a quick deal to his credit.

All the premises on which the Kellogg plan was based (Russia’s vulnerability to sanctions, huge losses of men, and a stalemated war) were false. Did no one on Trump’s team then do any due diligence on the Kellogg strategy? It seems (lazily) to have taken the Korean war as its template, without due consideration of whether it be appropriate, or not.

In the Korean instance, the ceasefire along a Conflict Line preceded political considerations, which came only later. And which remain ongoing – and unresolved – until today.

By launching premature demands for an immediate ceasefire during talks with Russian officials in Riyadh, Trump invited rejection. Firstly, because the Trump Team had no concrete plan for how to implement a ceasefire, simply presuming rather that all such details could be settled post-hoc. In short, it was presented to Trump as a ‘quick win’.

Only it wasn’t.

The outcome was fore-ordained – the ceasefire was declined. It should not have been allowed to happen, given competent staff work. Had none of Trump’s team been listening since 14 June of last year when Putin very clearly outlined MFA the Russian position on a ceasefire? And which has been repeated regularly ever since. Apparently not.

Yet even so, when Trump’s Envoy, Witkoff, returned from a long meeting with President Putin to report on the latter’s personal, detailed explanation of why a political framework must precede any ceasefire (unlike Korea), Witkoff’s account reportedly was met with the flat retort that ‘the Ukrainians would never agree’ from General Kellogg.

End of discussion, apparently. No decision taken.

Several more flights to Moscow have not altered the basic situation. Moscow awaits evidence that Trump is able to consolidate his position and can take charge of the situation. But until then, Moscow stands ready to facilitate a ‘rapprochement of positionality’ – but will not approve a unilateral ceasefire. (And nor will Zelensky).

The puzzle here is why Trump doesn’t cut off U.S. weapons and intelligence flows to Kiev, and tell the Europeans to butt out of Trump’s way? Does Kiev have some form of veto power? Does Team Trump not understand that the Europeans simply hope to disrupt Trump’s aim to normalise relations with Russia? They must do.

It seems that the “debate” (if you can call it that) in the Trump Team largely excluded real life factors. It took place at some high normative level, where certain facts and truths are simply assumed.

Maybe the Sunk Costs phenomenon weighed heavily – the longer you continue with a course of action (no matter how stupid), the less willing you are to change it. Changing it would be interpreted as acknowledging error – and acknowledging error is the first stage to losing power.

And there is a parallel with the talks with Iran.

Trump has a vision for a negotiated settlement with Iran that would achieve his objective of ‘no Iranian nuclear weapon’ – though the aim itself, is something of a tautology given that the U.S. intelligence community already has determined that Iran has NO nuclear weapon.

How do you stop something that is not occurring? Well, ‘intent’ is an enormously difficult concept to ring-fence. So, the Team heads back to basics: to the original Rand Organisation’s firm doctrine that there exists no qualitative difference between peaceful and weapon-linked enrichment of uranium. So, no enrichment should be permitted.

Only Iran does have enrichment – thanks to the Obama concession as part of the JCPOA, which allowed it, subject to limitations.

Many ideas are floating around about how to square this circle – of Iran’s refusal to relinquish enrichment versus Trump’s ‘no capacity’ to weaponise dictum. None of the ideas is new: Importing into Iran enriched feedstock; exporting Iran’s highly enriched uranium to Russia (something already done as part of the JCPOA), and having Russia build Iran’s nuclear energy capacity to power its industry. The problem is that Russia is already doing that too. It has one plant already up, and another in construction.

Israel naturally has its own proposals too: Root out all Iranian enrichment infrastructure and missile delivery capacity.

Only Iran will never agree to this.

So, the choice is either a jacked-up inspection and technical surveillance system in a JCPOA-like accord (which will not make either Israel or the pro-Israel Institutional leadership happy). Or military action.

Which takes us back to the Trump Team and the internecine divisions within the Pentagon.

Pete Hegseth sent the following message to Iran, posted on his social media account:

“We see your LETHAL support to The Houthis. We know exactly what you are doing. You know very well what the U.S. Military is capable of – and you were warned. You will pay the CONSEQUENCE at the time and place of our choosing”.

Plainly, Hegseth is frustrated. As Larry Johnson has noted:

“The Trump team has been labouring under [another] false assumption that the Biden folks did not make a serious effort to destroy the Houthis’ arsenal of missiles and drones. The Trumpers believed that they could bomb the Houthis into submission. Instead, the U.S. is demonstrating to all countries in the region the limits of its naval and air power … Despite more than 600 bombing sorties, the Houthis continue to launch missiles and drones at U.S. ships in the Red Sea and targets inside Israel”.

So, Team Trump has waded firstly into one conflict (Yemen), and secondly, into a complex negotiation with Iran, again seemingly without doing its homework on Yemen. Is this down to group think again:

“In a situation of uncertainty like the present, solidarity comes to be seen as an end in itself, and nobody wants to be accused of ‘weakening the West’ or ‘strengthening Iran’. If you have to be wrong, best be wrong in the company of as many others as possible”.

Will Israel let this pass? It is beavering away with General Kurilla (the U.S. General in command at CENTCOM) in the bunker under the Israeli Defence Department – preparing plans for a joint attack on Iran. Israel appears very keen on his work.

Yet, the fundamental impediment to achieving an accord with Iran is more crucial – in that, as presently construed, the U.S. approach to the negotiations breaks all the rules about how to initiate a weapons-limitation treaty.

On the one hand, there is Israel with a triad of nuclear weapons systems and delivery capacities: from submarines, aircraft and by missile. Israel has also threatened the use of nuclear weapons – recently in Gaza and earlier during the first Iraq war, in response to Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile capacity.

The missing principle here is any modicum of reciprocity. Iran is said to threaten Israel – and Israel regularly threatens Iran. And Israel, of course, wants Iran neutered and disarmed and insists itself be untouched (no NPT, no IAEA inspections, no acknowledgment).

The arms-limitation treaties initiated by JF Kennedy with Khruschev derived from the successful reciprocal negotiation by which the U.S. withdrew its missiles from Turkey before Russia removed its own missiles from Cuba.

It must be clear to Trump and Witkoff that such a lopsided proposal as theirs for Iran bears no relation to geo-political realities – and is therefore likely to fail (sooner or later). Team Trump thus, is cornering itself into military action against Iran – which they will then own.

Trump does not want that; Iran does not want that. So, has this been adequately thought through? Has the Yemen experience been taken fully into account? Has the Trump Team mooted some off-ramp?

One creative way out of the dilemma – and which might restore at least some semblance to a classical arms limitation treaty exercise – would be for Trump to air the notion that now is time for Israel to enter the NPT and to have its weapons inspected by the IAEA.

Will Trump do that? No.

It then becomes obvious why.

This Trump transformation of America was intended to be rebuilt as America First.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

The post Why Doesn’t the ‘Deal-Maker’ Close the Deal? appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump has proposed using the revenue from his increased tariffs to lower or even eliminate income taxes — with a priority on removing Americans making less than 200,000 dollars a year from the tax rolls. Exempting more Americans from income taxes — and lowering taxes on other Americans— is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. However, replacing income taxes with tariffs may have negative consequences for the very Americans President Trump wants to help.

Replacing with tariffs what the government raises from income taxes may require raising tariffs even higher than President Trump’s “liberation” tariffs. This would cause more price increases and encourage other governments to retaliate by raising their tariffs, further disrupting supply chains and leading to even higher prices and shortages. The negative impacts of tariffs could dwarf the benefits of lower, or even no, income taxes.

Consumers can try to avoid tariffs on goods. Massive avoidance of tariffs could lead to the imposing of higher tariffs or new taxes. The reason politicians must play the game of “offsetting” tax reductions with tax increases is they refuse to make meaningful reductions in government spending. The politicians’ favorite tax is the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax because it is hidden. It is also regressive, making it the worst type of tax.

The media and big spenders in both parties are screaming about how President Trump’s budget proposal contains large reductions in federal spending. However, even if all of President Trump’s 163 billion dollars of proposed cuts are enacted in law, the federal government will still spend about 1.7 trillion dollars next year in its “discretionary” budget. The cuts would be less than eight percent.

While President Trump is proposing many necessary cuts in federal agencies and programs, including those concerning the use of taxpayer money to promote “wokeness,” his budget increases military spending to around a trillion dollars. It also makes no changes to Social Security or Medicare. This means President Trump’s supposed radical spending plan does not reduce spending on three of the four largest items in the federal budget. The fourth is interest payments on the national debt, which Congress cannot reduce except by cutting spending.

Of course, it is unlikely that all, or even most, of President Trump’s spending cuts will be enacted into law. Prominent Republicans have already announced opposition to some of President Trump’s spending cuts. Some Republican defense hawks, including the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have criticized President Trump’s budget plan for not spending enough on the military!

The truth is that, if the president and Congress were serious about cutting spending, they would start by slashing the Pentagon’s budget. Very little of the military spending actually goes to defending the American people. Instead, much military spending goes to maintaining a global empire and lining the pockets of the military-industrial complex. Does anyone believe the safety of Americans depends on the US government maintaining over 700 military bases abroad?

The fiscal crisis facing America is rooted in a larger philosophic crisis. Too many Americans have embraced the notion that the US government has the moral right and competence to run the economy, run the world, and even run our lives. This system will not change until a critical mass of people embrace the ideas of liberty. Those of us who know the truth must do all we can to spread the message of liberty, peace, and prosperity.

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Last week I published a long article exploring the history of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose anti-Communist crusade dominated our politics of the early 1950s. His activities gave rise to “McCarthyism” as a term of abuse and despite the passage of three generations, that expression still seems so widely used today that it has its own 14,000 word Wikipedia article.

In February 1950 McCarthy received huge media attention when he began giving public speeches denouncing the alleged dangers our country faced from the subversive activities of Communists and Soviet agents. Based upon my mainstream history textbooks and the media coverage I’d absorbed, I’d always regarded those claims as wildly exaggerated, so I’d been greatly surprised to gradually discover that the domestic threat of Soviet Communist agents had once been at least as severe as McCarthy alleged.

However, although I became convinced that the menace of Communist infiltration had been very real, I still regarded the senator’s own behavior as erratic, with McCarthy prone to making wild accusations. As I wrote a dozen years ago:

In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America’s representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.

Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, when a dying Franklin Roosevelt negotiated the outlines of postwar Europe with Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta summit, one of his important advisors was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet side. Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.

Some years later I’d read Blacklisted by History, a ringing 2007 defense of McCarthy and his activities by M. Stanton Evans, and last month I did the same with most of the other major books in the pro-McCarthy camp. These included Arthur Herman’s widely praised 1999 biography Joseph McCarthy, Ann Coulter’s 2003 bestseller Treason, the famous 1954 work McCarthy and His Enemies by William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, and Buckley’s much later 1999 novel The Redhunter, a lightly fictionalized account of the Wisconsin senator’s career. To provide some balance, I also reread Richard Rovere’s short but highly influential 1959 work Senator Joe McCarthy, providing an account quite hostile to the senator.

With the exception of the Rovere book, all these other works had been written by McCarthy’s strongest defenders, but based upon the factual information they provided, my verdict of a dozen years ago was fully confirmed. McCarthy was right that America had faced a great threat from Soviet Communist subversion, but he was frequently wrong about almost everything else.

McCarthy often made wild, unsubstantiated accusations, and he was just as dishonest and careless with facts as his mainstream media critics had always claimed. So although he was hugely successful for several years, he ultimately did enormous damage to his own cause. Moreover, he was very much of a latecomer to the Communism issue and quite possibly merely an opportunist. So he became a public figure who permanently tainted the important work already done by his far more scrupulous and competent political allies.

The widely televised Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954 destroyed his credibility, and a few months later he was censured by an overwhelming vote of his fellow senators. After his political eclipse, he gradually drank himself to death over the next couple of years.

By the late 1950s, the self-destructive nature of McCarthy’s efforts were so widely recognized that they had become a theme of popular fiction. For example, Richard Condon published his Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate in 1959 and it was soon made into a famous movie of the same title. This work portrayed the extremely nefarious plots of Communist agents to seize control of our country, but ironically enough, the McCarthy-like political character was eventually revealed to be a Communist dupe, manipulated by our foreign enemies into destroying our society and its freedoms while capturing our government for the Communist conspirators who secretly controlled him.

• American Pravda: McCarthyism, Part I – The Man
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 28, 2025 • 12,700 Words

Towards the beginning of my long article I described how the 1990s declassification of the Venona Decrypts fully confirmed the enormous influence that agents of Soviet Communism had gained over our federal government during the 1930s and 1940s. By the late 1940s, the discovery of so many very high-ranking Soviet operatives such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White easily explained the huge attention that McCarthy attracted when he launched his anti-Communist crusade with a public speech in February 1950, and the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg later that same year for nuclear weapons espionage seemed to further boost the credibility of his claims. So although McCarthy’s accusations were often bombastic and unsubstantiated, they resonated deeply with a fearful public grown suspicious that our elected officials were concealing the true extent of ongoing Communist subversion.

The documented existence of all those important Soviet agents was obviously the proximal factor behind the widespread popular support that McCarthy’s political crusade quickly attracted. But I think that there were also much deeper political roots to McCarthyism, roots that have almost always been ignored in our histories of that era, whether these were written by the senator’s many mainstream critics or by his small handful of committed defenders. This strange silence seems due to the controversial nature of that prior history, but an important clue to that hidden backstory may be found in an influential book from that era.

In 1955 Daniel Bell published The New American Right, a collection of essays by leading mainstream American academics, and in 1963 he reissued that same work in much expanded form as The Radical Right. McCarthyism was a major part of the analysis and the last two essays by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset totaled more than 140 pages with both of these focused upon that subject. Lipset demonstrated that the political campaign of the Wisconsin senator shared many of its ideological roots and much of its social base with the earlier 1930s movement of Father Charles Coughlin, a hugely popular anti-Communist radio priest from neighboring Michigan.

Launched in the late 1920s, Coughlin’s syndicated weekly radio show eventually became political and grew tremendously popular. At his 1930s peak Coughlin had amassed an enormous national audience estimated at 30 million regular listeners, amounting to roughly one-quarter of the entire American population, probably making him the world’s most influential broadcaster. By 1934 the priest was receiving over 10,000 letters of support each day, considerably more than President Franklin Roosevelt or anyone else.

Coughlin began as a strong early supporter of FDR and his New Deal reforms, coining the popular phrases “Roosevelt or Ruin” and “The New Deal is Christ’s Deal.” But he gradually became disillusioned with FDR and his policies, viewing them as insufficiently bold and far too beholden to Wall Street financial interests. So Coughlin instead began encouraging the political ambitions of Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana, a populist figure who planned to challenge Roosevelt for reelection in 1936, running on a radical platform of “Share the Wealth.”

The twin stories of Coughlin and Long and their complex relationship are told in Voices of Protest, an award-winning 1982 book by the distinguished historian Alan Brinkley, who suggested that such a complementary Long-Coughlin political partnership might have given Roosevelt a very difficult race in 1936. But those plans suddenly collapsed in September 1935 when Long was assassinated by a crazed lone gunman, who himself was immediately shot dead. That fortuitous event allowed FDR to win a huge reelection landslide the following year against a weak Republican opponent whose traditional conservative policies offered little popular appeal.

Over the years that followed, Coughlin grew increasingly critical of Jews and Jewish influence, given their hugely disproportionate role as Wall Street bankers, whose activities he regarded as so damaging to the interests of the ordinary American workers whom he championed. In March 1936 he began publishing a weekly political newspaper called Social Justice and it eventually reached a peak circulation of about a million subscribers in the late 1930s, making it one of the most widely read publications in America, having more than ten times the combined circulation of the Nation and the New Republic, the leading liberal weeklies. The complete archives of Social Justice are conveniently available on this website.

Coughlin had always been hostile to Communism, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, he began strongly supporting the anti-Communist Nationalist forces, who were also backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Meanwhile, Jewish groups overwhelmingly supported the opposing Loyalist side, heavily backed both by foreign Communists and by Stalin’s Soviet Union. This further increased Coughlin’s suspicion of Jews.

During this same period, Jewish groups and most of the American mainstream media began harshly condemning Nazi Germany for the persecution of its tiny 1% Jewish minority, and these public attacks reached a crescendo after dozens of Jews were killed in the November 1938 Kristallnacht riots, probably orchestrated by some Nazi leaders.

But Coughlin claimed that Jewish bankers had played a crucial role in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought Soviet Communism to power, while the very heavily Jewish regime thereby established had been responsible for the deaths of many millions of Christians, easily explaining the Nazi hostility toward Jews and their influence. Coughlin was naturally outraged that our media focused so much of its attention upon the dozens of Jewish deaths at the hands of German Nazis rather than the millions of Christian deaths at the hands of Bolshevik Jews.

These sorts of matters have largely been excluded from our more recent mainstream historical narratives, but they widely circulated at the time. Although I neglected to mention Coughlin I discussed some of these controversial issues in one of my earliest American Pravda articles, published in 2018:

• American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 23, 2018 • 7,000 Words

In 1938 Coughlin established a new anti-Communist political organization called the Christian Front, and according to Wikipedia it soon attracted several thousand members, mostly Irish-American men in New York City and other East Coast urban centers. Around that same time, Coughlin was regularly vilified as a fascist sympathizer and the Roosevelt Administration began making efforts to remove him from the airwaves. These efforts intensified after World War II broke out in September 1939 and Coughlin become a leading opponent of American intervention in that military conflict.

In January 1940, the FBI raided the Brooklyn headquarters of the Christian Front and arrested 17 men on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. But although one defendant committed suicide, the trials of all the others ended in acquittals or hung juries, thus humiliating the federal prosecutors.

But pressure continued and by September 1940 Coughlin was forced to end his radio broadcasts. Then in April 1942 the Espionage Act of 1917 was invoked to ban his Social Justice newspaper from the mails, effectively eliminating nearly all his national media influence. Thus, government action had been used to silence the voice of America’s leading broadcaster and also ban the distribution of one of our largest national newspapers, actions vastly more serious than anything done during the anti-Communist domestic campaigns of the Korean War era a decade later.

This extreme crackdown on Coughlin continued as FDR’s Attorney General Francis Biddle soon convened a federal grand jury to indict him and his publication on charges of sedition. Biddle then worked out a deal with Coughlin’s ecclesiastical superior Archbishop Edward Mooney, promising that the U.S. Justice Department would drop its prosecution of the priest if he closed Social Justice and permanently ceased all his political activities. With Mooney threatening to suspend his ministry, Coughlin agreed to those severe terms. Although he remained the pastor of his local church and lived until 1979, his political and media activities had come to a permanent end.

With Coughlin no longer having a media platform to publicly defend himself, his bitter enemies were able to construct an entirely one-sided narrative of his history and beliefs, and in the aftermath of the American victory in World War II, this official verdict on Coughlin’s political career became an extremely hostile one. Decades later, my history textbooks dismissed him in just a sentence or two as a popular antisemitic demagogue with strong fascist tendencies, someone who regularly promoted various implausible conspiratorial theories regarding Jews and Communism.

This huge stigma ensured that when a new generation of rising Republican leaders such as McCarthy and Richard Nixon entered Congress in the first postwar elections of 1946, they apparently never considered identifying themselves with a defeated and demonized figure such as Coughlin, who was already fast becoming a fading memory in elite DC circles. Also, many of these new elected officials had made their names and reputations in World War II, thus rendering Coughlin’s fierce opposition to that conflict especially toxic.

And this harsh dismissal of Coughlin grew even stronger over the generations that followed, after all direct memory of his once enormous national influence had been forgotten. All that remained was the very negative image inserted into our history books of a failed, antisemitic political demagogue who had supported our Axis enemies.

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Presidents, like corporate CEOs and everyone else, have a limited span of control.  They can’t know everything or focus on everything.  Most presidential decisions are just acceptances of subordinate’s decisions. I know it.  I have been there.  I have seen it, both the President of the United States and the CEOs and boards of corporations are dependent on information that comes from below. And often in the case of government the information from below is from outside.

We are now witnessing this in the Trump regime. Real ID is a George W. Bush/Cheney regime measure from the fake “war on terror” that was used by Washington to remove Arab governments opposed to Greater Israel.  Until Trump, no president wanted the flack of imposing it on “free” American citizens, thus revealing to them how unfree they are.  But the police state crowd see Trump’s concern with illegals as an opportunity to finally get their old handiwork from the “war on terror” Implemented.  And Trump has obliged. 

We are also witnessing the ruling establishment’s success in removing Trump’s people in the hopes of replacing them with one of theirs.  Having learned nothing from failing to stand by General Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser for ten minutes in Trump’s first term, Trump has repeated his mistake.  He kicked his national security advisor upstairs to be US Ambassador to the UN.  Why?  Because someone mistakenly included the Jewish editor of the leftwing magazine, The Atlantic, in on a meeting about bombing Yemen.  

Clearly, the invitee list was a staff responsibility.  The real problem is that Atlantic editor Goldberg did not announce at the meeting that he doubted he was supposed to be present in a national security discussion.  Instead he kept silent, took notes, and published an article.  I do think that his dishonest behavior displaying a total lack of integrity is indictable.  Instead of kicking his national security advisor upstairs, Trump should have had AG Bondi arrest and prosecute Goldberg for revealing national security secrets. But Trump would be too afraid to treat an Israeli-protected person that way. So Trump sacrificed his national security advisor.

Trump’s failure signals weakness or inattention, and now they are after his Defense Secretary. Same kind of charge. Hegseth let some confidential information out via some communication service to the delight of the Israel Lobby, which is using the mistake to have Hegseth removed. 

People are confused about this, because Hegseth is a Zionist, a full-time supporter of Israel. What got Hegseth in trouble is that he listened to knowledgable Pentagon personnel who explained to him that a US war with Iran for Israel was fraught with danger. He was advised, correctly, that once the US ignited a war Washington had no ability to control it.  The consequence could be the destruction of Washington’s bases in the Middle East and loss of every Navy aircraft carrier in the vicinity.  Hegseth backed off, Israel hit the roof, and Hegseth had to fire the advisers who told him the truth.

According to the liberal/left, the Democrats, and the media, Trump is tyrannical strength itself, imposing dictatorship on America, but neither Trump nor his administration have the strength to stand up to Israel.

What Trump is going to do is to make Israel great, not America.

All over the Western world it is already the case in many countries, such as Great Britain and Germany that criticism of Israel or of Jews is a criminal offense, and it is becoming the same in every Western country, eventually even in Russia. In America the Trump regime is deporting students who protest Israel’s American-supported genocide of the Palestinians.  Long ago Israeli propagandists convinced Americans that every Palestinian, even 3-year old children, was a terrorist who wore bomb vests in order to kill Israelis.  All the while Israel killed Palestinians, 3-year olds included, by the bomb load.

Even in the Red State of Texas, if you protest Israel’s genocide of Palestine, you are ineligible to have a state contract.

America is totally owned by Israel.  So is Trump.  So how can America be “made great again”?

The post Trump Is Destroying America, but He Is Making Israel Great appeared first on LewRockwell.

I remember reading an October 2019 issue of Forbes about how Italy was already insolvent and would never get out of its debt trap.

A debt trap occurs when economic growth and population demographics—not enough young people to take care of retired people—become grossly insufficient to finance a society’s growing debt (private and public).

At the time I wondered how international banking institutions would deal with Italy’s pending debt crisis. Then along came COVID-19, which seemed to justify a fresh round of massive money creation.

Though not as crass as Italy, the U.S. was also, at the beginning of 2020, apparently giving up on the real economy growing sufficiently to balance increasing U.S. government debt financing of America’s standard of living.

Debt is a rational instrument when it is used to increase productivity—NOT when it used to create money out of thin air and disbursed to legions of unproductive people and activities. Debt is also unproductive when it is primarily used for inflating assets such as large homes and the price-to-earnings ratio of stocks.

At the beginning of 2020, it was the clear the Federal Reserve would eventually have to raise interest rates to slow down inflation, which would raise borrowing costs to an untenable level, which would put an end to the debt-financed party that had raged since 2009.

What could possibly justify a fresh round of money-creation out of thin air?

Along came COVID-19, and on March 27, 2020, the U.S. government passed the CARES Act—an instrument for bailing out the entire economy reminiscent of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 for bailing out Wall Street, only the amount of money created ($2.2 trillion) for the latter crisis was a much larger sum, equivalent to 10% of U.S. GDP.

At the time I wondered if the danger of COVID-19 to ALL of society, including young people, was being grossly exaggerated to justify this insanely extravagant money creation. About a year later I had a conversation with Ed Dowd in which he persuasively argued that this was indeed the case.

At the end of 2021, I had a conversation with New York state attorney named Beth Parlato. Beth had, during the pandemic, devoted her legal practice to suing hospitals to allow dying patients to take Ivermectin and other off-label drugs in an attempt to avoid being put to death on a ventilator.

At the end of our conversation, I asked her if she was still getting many calls from patients’ families who needed her help.

“No,” she replied. “The phone has fallen fairly silent. I think maybe the war is over.” In that instant, I had an eery thought that another “war” would soon arrive to take the pandemic’s place.

The situation in Ukraine had been heating up that fall, and it occurred to me that the Biden administration was not doing anything to avert it from turning into a full blown crisis. My perception was confirmed when the baleful Vice President Kamala Harris was sent to address the Munich Security Conference in February 2022.

Her bizarre and contradictory speech about Ukraine and NATO struck me as yet another provocation of Russia.

Yesterday I listened to an interview with a financial analyst and former hedge fund manager named Alex Krainer about the European Union’s untenable financial condition.

Apparently because the people who run the E.U. and Germany have lost their minds, they have severely damaged Germany’s economy by taking various measures against it (which Krainer elucidates).

The stunning irrationality of British and E.U. administrators is symbolically expressed in their recent talk about using aerosols to dim the sun after these same people spent billions in erecting gigantic, ugly, and inefficient solar panels.

All of this raises a provocative question — namely, is war with Russia now the EU’s only hope for avoiding financial collapse?

Krainer mentions the parallel of Alberta, Canada’s oil reserves being used as collateral for more debt issuance during the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Have the lunatics in Washington and Brussels fantasized about using Ukrainian and Russian mineral assets to collateralize yet more debt creation?

Krainer’s recollection of the Russian situation in the 1990s—when Boris Yeltin’s administration sold Russian mineral assets for pennies on the dollar—does indeed seem relevant.

Could it be that Vladimir Putin’s biggest sin—in the eyes of the West—was putting an end to the looting party that raged under Yeltsin? It wouldn’t surprise me if this is at least partly the case.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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Since their decisive losses across the board in the 2024 elections, the Democratic Party has been searching for a way forward and a way to fix its growing unpopularity.

The party has been dogged by continued negative polling figures, with an ABC News-Washington Post-Ipsos poll released last month showing 69% of people believe the Democratic Party is out of touch with most people’s concerns.

An NBC News Stay Tuned Poll released last month showed that when asked which party fights for people like you, 38% said neither party, while 24% said the Republican Party and only 23% said the Democratic Party.

While the party looks for answers and a leader to guide them to victory in the 2026 and 2028 elections, here are some of the reasons Democrats believe their party has lost its popularity.

Not progressive enough

Hard-left members of the Democratic Party have insisted the party’s attempted appeals to centrists during the 2024 campaign were unwise and that they should embrace progressive messages going forward.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have gone on a nationwide “Fight Oligarchy” tour directed against President Donald Trump and Republicans, with stops in Republican areas along with Democratic strongholds. The tour, led by two of the most well-known progressives in Congress, has been criticized by some Democrats like Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Sanders has pushed back on those critiques.

“Geez, we had 36,000 people out in Los Angeles, 34,000 people in Colorado, we had 30,000 people in Folsom, California, which is kind of a rural area. I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are. I think they understand very well that the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%,” Sanders said on NBC News’s Meet the Press last month.

“If we don’t address that issue, the American people will continue to turn their backs on democracy because they’re looking around them saying, ‘Does anybody understand what I am going through?’ And unfortunately, right now to a large degree neither party does,” he said.

Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate and has run for the party’s presidential nomination twice, also took aim at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for saying the party was unified as the progressive and establishment wings of the party clash over its direction.

“United around what? Are we united around guaranteeing healthcare to all people? … Are we united in tackling a corrupt campaign finance system?” he questioned. “How do you deal with politics in America without understanding that billionaires play an enormously destructive role in both political parties?” Sanders said in an interview on CNN last week.

Bad messaging

Another criticism Sanders had in the CNN interview was the Democrats’ lack of clear messaging.

“You need an agenda,” Sanders said in the interview. “[What] the Democrats need to do right now is to have the courage to take on the very powerful special interests who, to a large degree, control the political process and the legislative process in the United States.”

A lack of clear messaging has been a constant item Democrats have pointed to when asked about the party’s unpopularity. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has been vocal about the party needing a clear message and policies, rather than focusing on candidates and personality.

“I’m not worried about [whether] we will find a great candidate,” he said. “But what do we stand for? What are we about? What are we going to fight for?” Newsom told NBC News.

“Who are we? And if we’re a bunch of dangling verbs and policy statements — I make this mistake often, too. I answer a question with 10 policy responses, as opposed to what do [I] stand for,” he added.

When asked about if she would consider a 2028 presidential run last week, former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also pointed out that the party must figure out its direction and its message to be able to compete in the next presidential election.

“How will we overcome this impression that we’re elitist, we’re out of touch, we don’t have our sense on the culture?” Raimondo said. “There’s so much to do. I don’t know how many cycles it’s gonna take. There’s a reason there were a dozen years between Carter and Clinton. And I don’t know where we are in that cycle.”

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Now that the papacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is behind us, it is worth not only assessing his papacy but also the papacy itself. While conservative Catholics criticized Francis’ doctrinal ambiguity, his watered-down moral teaching, and his support for compromised prelates, it is only fair to ask ourselves what his motivations were.

I think they can be summed up in his rejection of the mozzetta before his first appearance that evening of March 13, 2013. In rejecting the traditional red shoulder cape, he reportedly said to Msgr. Marini, “You put it on. The carnival is over.” This, however, is likely an urban legend. Another report has Francis simply saying, “I prefer not to.” Either way, the decision was symbolic.

Francis was signaling a shift away from what he considered an overly grandiose papacy. From his first appearance, saying “good evening” and asking for the people’s blessing, Francis aimed to shift away from a focus on the pope to a focus on the people. Coming from the social struggles of South America, Francis wanted a “poor Church for the poor.”

So, he set about displaying his vision for the Church: He eschewed papal trappings, rejecting ornate vestments and the apartment in the Apostolic Palace for simpler attire and the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse. He referred to himself as the “Bishop of Rome” rather than grander titles, signaling a return to service over splendor. He intended for his leadership style to prioritize dialogue and synodality, encouraging bishops and laypeople to share responsibility for the Church’s mission. He embraced non-Catholic Christians and members of other religions, chatted with atheists, and insisted that the Church was for everyone.

History will judge whether he succeeded in his aims. His critics soon lamented the ambiguity and watered-down Catholicism that invariably accompany attempts at accommodation. His pastoral flexibility undermined the clarity of Catholic moral standards while his ecumenical and interreligious outreach blurred the lines of doctrinal clarity.

All of these elements—both laudable and lamentable—are part of Francis’ legacy, but I doubt whether the Franciscan shift will be more than a blip in the venerable history of the papacy. There are signs that the Catholic Church, and the world in general, has had quite enough of the dialogue and openness that is too often a mask for relativism. There is a hunger for clarity, stability, and the beauty, truth, and goodness that can only be found in traditional Catholicism.

Perhaps instead of pastoral openness, flexibility, synodality, and easygoing ambiguity, Pope Francis’ more lasting legacy will be the fact that he helped Catholics to reassess the papacy itself. In so doing, he helped them regain a fresh understanding of the core of the Faith, what it really means to be a Catholic, and what a pope’s job really is.

The uncomfortable truth is that too many Catholics have a bloated understanding of and admiration for the person and role of the pope. In an age of global celebrity, the pope is right up there with the monarch of England as one of the most famous authority figures on the world stage. And for too many Catholics, the pope is the Catholic Faith. Like the crass Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, in their minds the pope really is an absolute and infallible monarch who cannot err even in the weather forecast. Pope Francis helped to correct that misapprehension. For that, I, for one, am grateful.

Ultramontanism Revisited

Someone quizzed me on social media some time ago, “Is ultramontanism a heresy like Montanism?” I answered, “Montanism is a heresy. Ultramontanism is a mistake.”

Ultramontanism is that 19th-century movement within Catholicism that emphasized the supreme authority of the pope over national churches and secular governments. It emerged as a response to liberalism and secular modernism. It championed centralized papal authority, culminating in the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), which defined papal infallibility; but, over time, a kind of broader ultramontanism became the default setting. One of the contributing factors is that through two world wars the popes provided strong, unified moral leadership—leadership that transcended the political and cultural chaos of the first half of the 20th century.

This centralization strengthened the Church’s unity but also created an image of the pope as an almost superhuman figure. So, by the second half of the 20th century, the stage was set for the larger-than-life papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

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It’s vain and futile to suppose that the disordered minds of Western Civ’s entrenched Wokester Jacobins might ever be subject to polite persuasion about anything they believe. They believe only in the power of pushing their fellow citizens around, and so, alas, the only persuasion that might conceivably work to stop their infantile assaults on liberty, truth, and decency is to push back harder until they suffer and break.

This is something that most parents with young children instinctively understand. You don’t negotiate with two-year-olds. You tell them how things are and what sort of behavior is required of them, as plainly and simply as possible. Mr. Trump, having been the father of many two-year-olds over time, appears to get this. It has been apparent for years that Mr. Trump’s symbolic role as a father figure is the most deeply resented feature of his role in US politics.

It also appears that many men in this country likewise get this, perhaps because nature conditions them early on to understand that some day they might have to play the role of father, meaning they will have to push back hard against emotional disorder, hysteria, illogic, and untruth, and violence.

Hence, you might see the peril of living in a land with so many fatherless households. This lamentable state of things defines the Democratic Party, where raging, inchoate, resentment-driven Jacobinism dwells, a party now with no leader, a household with no father, no one to regulate its frenzied, power-seeking behavior. This also tells you how the Democratic Party has become the party run by women, and by particular types of women — women who have traded the management of children and households for bureaucratic careerism, women too lacking in feminine appeal to attract mates, women attempting to become the men missing in their lives — and men wishing to become women, or pretending to be women.

And so you see how these disorders play out in the ongoing melodrama of men in women’s sports, a proposition so obviously insane that no healthy society has ever abided it for a moment until the American Jacobins ran with it as a cardinal political irritant to vex their opponents (and really for no other reason). The state of Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, clashed openly with Mr. Trump over his executive order to desist from allowing biological men in women’s sports. The matter is currently making its way through the courts.

This week, a “trans” athlete named Soren Stark-Chessa, beat the field of females in a Maine track-meet by a country mile in the 800-meter and 1600-meter runs. No one, except the political leadership of Maine, was fooled about the fairness of this, of course. Fairness is not the point. Intransigent defiance of reality was the point. It is always the point for Jacobin politicians.

What is most obviously insane in matters like this, is that the female governor is so eager to punish and humiliate her younger fellow females in order to merely press a political point — that she is the boss of Maine, and nobody can tell her what to do, even if she deranges the cultures of schooling and sports. This illustrates, by the way, a principal difference in the way men’s and women’s brains work. Men typically understand boundaries, where things begin and end. It is a necessary cognitive device for regulating behavior in the household and for acting in the face of danger when required.

Sports is just a microcosm of our politics. The whole gestalt of Woke-Jacobin politics is driven by the wish to dissolve boundaries. That is, it is driven by female minds, and what the Woke-Jacobins might call female-adjacent minds. That is why the open border fiasco was another point-of-principle for the Democratic Party — and why “Joe Biden” the phantom president (actually the shadowy figures behind him) pretended that nothing could be done about it.

Mr. Trump demonstrated that was a lie in a New York minute. The damage from four years of a wide-open border is immense, much worse than men running in girls’ races. The motive for it is also obvious: to jam as many illegal aliens as possible into the country so as 1) to disorder the next census count in swing states to keep congressional districts safe, and 2) to install a base of new “voters” — qualified to vote or not — who will be eternally grateful to the Democratic Party for letting them flood into the country and gifting them with housing, social services, transportation, free meals, and walking-around money.

And now, a Woke-Jacobin judiciary, assisted by an infrastructure of Lawfare ninjas, led by the outlaw Norm Eisen, and financed by George Soros, and what remains of Soros-adjacent NGOs, is using the courts to keep all those illegally-admitted aliens in place here at all costs. So, you see, they are attempting to dissolve a boundary crucial to the Republic’s survival: who is a citizen and who is not a citizen, and what are the privileges entailed? The objective is to keep this dispute alive in the courts long enough to affect the 2026 midterm elections in the hopes of winning Congress back.

You can also see how this will oblige Mr. Trump to marshal the most aggressive legal force possible to crush this seditious legal insurrection. He has executive powers and perquisites in reserve that he has not used yet, or even revealed. He will defeat these monsters in the end just as he is methodically disassembling their scaffold of psychopathic ideology and their pipelines of funding. It will really be something to see.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

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