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There are always statistical games that can be played to mask the realities of our neofeudal economy and society. But “narrative control” can’t obscure the facts or the banquet of consequences that these realities have set.

Not everyone in America gained ground as a result of the rampant hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization of the 21st century. Let’s begin our analysis of who gained ground and who lost ground in the year 2001, when China entered the WTO (World Trade Organization) and offshoring / globalization shifted into high gear and when the Federal Reserve began ramping up its financialization / monetary manipulation–oops, sorry, policy interventions.

The top 1% and the top 10% gained ground. The bottom 90% lost ground, especially the bottom 50%. Wage earners lost ground, while corporate insiders, financiers, speculators using leverage and those lucky enough to be born long enough ago to buy assets at pre-bubble valuations gained ground.

If you want to argue with these facts, argue with the Federal Reserve Database. All these charts are drawn from the St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED Database.

Let’s start with the varying multiples generated by asset bubbles since 2001.

NASDAQ up 9.3X
Corporate profits up 6.2X
Case-Shiller Housing Index up 3X

Those are some serious bubbles, given that $1 in 2001 is $1.80 in today’s currency.

If the NASDAQ index had risen at the same rate as inflation since 2001, it would be 3,340, not 17,166.

Corporate profits would be $1.26 trillion annually, rather than $4.3 trillion. Hmm, $3 trillion a year is a nice chunk of extra change for gutting national security, quality and durability by offshoring essential industries.

The Case-Shiller Housing Index would be up from 110 in 2001 to 200 today, rather than 323.

So how did each household sector do since 2001?

Net worth of top 1% up 5X
Net worth of 90-99% up 3.9X
Net worth 50-90% up 3.2X
Net worth bottom 50% up 3X

How much of the nation’s total household net worth does each sector own now in dollars?

Total net worth: $160.2 trillion
top 1%: $49.4 trillion
90%-99%: $58.3 trillion
Top 10%: $107.7 trillion
Bottom 90%: $52.5 trillion
Bottom 50%: $4 trillion

How much of the nation’s total household net worth does each sector own now as a percentage of total net worth?

Total net worth: $160.2 trillion
Top 1%: 31%
90%-99%: 36.5%
TOP 10%: 67.5%
Bottom 50%: 2.5%
50%-90%: 30%
BOTTOM 90%: 32.5%

Since wealth is concentrated in the top layer of each sector–the top 1% own the lion’s share of the top 10%’s net worth, and the top 10% of the 50% to 90% sector own the lion’s share of that sector’s net worth–we can say with confidence that the top 20% own roughly 80% of the net worth–in line with the Pareto Distribution (the 80/20 rule).

What’s lost in this aggregate number is the extreme concentration of income-producing wealth (and thus political power) in the top 0.1% of the citizenry and the mere crumbs left to the bottom 60%. As many of us have pointed out over the past 15 years, the only accurate description for this system is neofeudal, where a New Nobility owns the wealth and political power, the bottom 80% are modern-day debt-serfs and the “middle class” is now the 90% to 99% sector, with those in the 80% to 90% sector having just enough home equity to fancy themselves “middle class” in name if not in ownership of income-producing assets or political influence.

The NASDAQ stock market index: up 10X at its recent peak.

Corporate profits up 6.2X as surveillance pricing, monopoly price-gouging, crapification, planned obsolescence and extortion have worked marvelously well in stripmining the citizenry to enrich the top 10% who own 90% of all stocks, the “shareholders.”

Wage earners’ share of the nation’s income has been slashed over the past five decades. Unsurprisingly, hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization did nothing to reverse this decline of American labor in favor of global capital.

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Donald Trump and the Shadow of McCarthyism

Last month the Trump Administration launched an unprecedented assault against academic and intellectual freedom in America, targeting many of our most elite institutions of higher education.

As an example of this, enormous pressure was exerted against Columbia University in New York City by withdrawing $400 million in annual federal funding and demanding its full cooperation with the arrest of foreign students who had been critical of Israel’s massacre of Gazan civilians. Trump officials also required that Columbia’s prestigious Middle Eastern Studies program and other research centers be placed under “academic receivership,” ensuring their tight ideological control by pro-Israel overseers.

Faced with the dire threat of such a massive loss of funds, Acting President Katrina Armstrong acceded to those demands, but then resigned, much like her predecessor had done seven months earlier.

For similar reasons, the top leadership of Harvard University’s Middle Eastern Studies Center was forced to resign, seemingly destroying the academic independence of that prestigious institution eighty years after it had first been established. But apparently that preliminary academic concession was deemed insufficient, and Trump officials soon froze more than $2 billion in such federal funding to America’s most prestigious university. When Harvard resisted further demands, Trump illegally threatened to revoke Harvard’s non-profit status, ban all foreign students, and essentially attempt to destroy it.

Our government declared that all these attacks upon America’s top academic institutions were part of its sweeping ideological campaign to root out campus antisemitism, with that term now extended to include “anti-Zionism,” namely sharp criticism of the State of Israel and its policies.

The successful Hamas raid of October 7, 2023 had been followed by relentless Israeli attacks against the helpless civilians of Gaza, and these had prompted a huge wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests during 2024, outraging the Israeli government and its pro-Israel American supporters. The latter included many Jewish billionaire donors who exerted their enormous influence to successfully demand unprecedented crackdowns that involved the arrest of some 2,300 students and soon stamped out those demonstrations.

Despite that major success, the Zionist donors regarded their victory over the protesters as incomplete. With the pro-Israel Biden Administration now replaced by the even more strongly pro-Israel Trump Administration, they demanded that this campaign be extended to rooting out the ideological forces that they deemed responsible.

Under their influence, Trump and his top aides declared their intent to arrest and deport any foreign students who had participated in those campus protests or otherwise expressed their sharp criticism of Israel, and this soon resulted in a series of shocking incidents.

For many decades, legal permanent residents of the U.S. were assumed to possess all the same rights and privileges as American citizens, certainly including the Constitutional protections of our Bill of Rights. Their Green Cards could only be revoked for very serious crimes such as rape or murder, and cancelling student visas for ideological reasons was almost as rare.

But under Trump this completely changed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that a central foreign policy goal of the American government was combatting antisemitism everywhere across the world and anti-Zionism fell into that same category. Therefore those foreign students who strongly criticized Israel should be removed from American soil, and he cancelled the visas or Green Cards of some 300 of them, ordering their immediate deportation, with the total eventually rising to 1,500.

Some of the resulting scenes were quite shocking. A young Turkish doctoral candidate attending Tufts University on a Fulbright Scholarship was snatched off the streets of her Boston-area town by six masked federal agents, hustled into an unmarked car, and transferred to a holding cell in Louisiana in preparation for her deportation. Other raids on Columbia student housing by teams of federal agents picked up a Palestinian Green Card holder with an American citizen wife eight months pregnant. A South Korean undergraduate who had lived in the U.S. since the age of seven went into hiding to avoid a similar fate, while a student from India quickly fled to Canada to avoid arrest.

None of these university students had committed any crimes, but they were seized by federal agents in campus raids or grabbed from the streets of their cities merely for having expressed public criticism of the foreign government of Israel. Nothing as bizarre as this had ever previously happened in America.

For example, the Tufts student was abducted for having co-authored an op-ed in her campus newspaper a year earlier supporting the implementation of policies passed by an overwhelming vote of her own university’s Community Senate. The text of the piece that prompted her arrest was so anodyne and dull that I found it difficult to read without nodding off.

Repressive police states that arrest students for criticizing the government have hardly been uncommon throughout history. But I’d never previously heard of one that only implemented such measures for criticizing a foreign government. This demonstrated the true lines of sovereignty and political control governing today’s American society.

The declared aim of the Trump Administration and its ideological allies has been to completely root out and eliminate anti-Zionism across American universities. However, I think the likely outcome of this harsh ideological crackdown may be to destroy intellectual freedom at those institutions, thereby also destroying much of their global influence. Several weeks ago, I discussed these strange and alarming developments in an article.

• The Zionist Destruction of American Higher Education
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 31, 2025 • 7,300 Words

The Forgotten Menace of Soviet Communist Subversion

As might be expected, these dramatic Trump Administration attacks against free speech and academic freedom provoked a huge wave of sharp criticism, both across the mainstream media and among private individuals, and the word most often used to condemn such policies was “McCarthyism.” Throughout the month of March, I saw that term regularly expressed in angry YouTube interviews, published opinion pieces, and even in some of my personal email exchanges.

Yet although my own very critical article ran well over 7,000 words, it included no mention of either Sen. Joseph McCarthy nor his anti-Communist political crusade of the early 1950s. Trump’s actions seemed orders-of-magnitude more serious and unjustified than anything ever proposed by McCarthy, so I regarded any such comparisons as absurd and ridiculous.

Over the last three generations, the political methods employed by that notorious Republican junior senator from Wisconsin have become an almost universal byword for attacks against freedom of thought and speech, so much so that in recent years they have often been found in the angry accusations of Republicans, conservatives, and right-wingers as well as by their more leftward counterparts. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, any popular defense of McCarthy or his policies has become so rare that “McCarthyism” has almost been transformed into a generic, non-ideological term for totally unjustifiable political repression.

Two-term President Ronald Reagan was widely credited by his supporters with having won our half-century long Cold War against the Soviet Union and they also claimed that he had revitalized our economy, so at the time they hailed his policies as “Reaganism.” Yet although he loomed very large during his own era, his political stature has dwindled away so rapidly during the last couple of decades that I almost never see him favorably cited by conservatives younger than fifty, nor any mention of his eponymous package of policies. Indeed, no one has even bothered creating a Wikipedia page on “Reaganism.”

Meanwhile, McCarthy and his brand of politics are still widely discussed, and I think that no other political figure from our nearly 250 year national history has inspired a similar term that remains in common use. Indeed, many have suggested that McCarthy ranks as the single most universally vilified figure in American political history, while “McCarthyism” has become the shorthand for spewing forth careless, error-prone, and often dishonest accusations of treachery against political opponents. The Wikipedia page for that term runs a massive 14,000 words.

As I’ve often explained, I spent most of my life paying little attention to modern American history, drawing my limited understanding from introductory textbooks and the mainstream media coverage that I absorbed. Therefore, I never questioned that the accusations of Communist espionage and subversion made by Sen. McCarthy had been wildly exaggerated and often fallacious, nor that the resulting McCarthyite era had represented a terrible black mark in American politics. According to that standard account, his dark shadow over American society was only lifted when he over-reached himself and was politically destroyed through the joint efforts of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, the Democratic Party, and the American Army establishment.

But as I began reading more serious historical works, my perspective changed. I discovered that Communist spies and agents of influence in America had been far more numerous and powerful than I had ever imagined, and this became an important early strand in my American Pravda series.

Almost exactly a dozen years ago I opened my original article of that name by describing these shocking revelations, although I still expressed great skepticism toward McCarthy himself and his methods:

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.

The Cold War ended over two decades ago and Communism has been relegated to merely an unpleasant chapter in the history books, so today these facts are hardly much disputed. For example, liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein matter-of-factly referred to White as a “Soviet spy” in the title of his column on our postwar financial system. But during the actual period when America’s government was heavily influenced by Communist agents, such accusations were widely denounced as “Red-baiting” or ridiculed as right-wing conspiracy paranoia by many of our most influential journalists and publications. In 1982 liberal icon Susan Sontag ruefully acknowledged that for decades the subscribers to the lowbrow Readers Digest had received a more realistic view of the world than those who drew their knowledge from the elite liberal publications favored by her fellow intellectuals. I myself came of age near the end of the Cold War and always vaguely assumed that such lurid tales of espionage were wildly exaggerated. I was wrong.

• Our American Pravda
  Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words

Since my knowledge of American history ran no deeper than my basic textbooks and mainstream newspapers and magazines, the last decade or so has been a journey of discovery for me, and often a shocking one. I came of age many years after the Communist spy scares of the 1950s had faded into dim memory, and based on what I read, I always thought the whole matter more amusing than anything else. It seemed that about the only significant “Red” ever caught, who may or may not have been innocent, was some obscure individual bearing the unlikely name of “Alger Hiss,” and as late as the 1980s, his children still fiercely proclaimed his complete innocence in the pages of the New York Times. Although I thought he was probably guilty, it also seemed clear that the methods adopted by his persecutors such as Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon had actually done far more damage to our country during the unfortunate era named for the former figure.

During the 1990s, I occasionally read reviews of new books based on the Venona Papers—decrypted Soviet cables finally declassified—and they seemed to suggest that the Communist spy ring had both been real and far more extensive than I had imagined. But those events of a half-century earlier were hardly uppermost in my mind, and anyway other historians still fought a rear-guard battle in the newspapers, arguing that many of the Venona texts were fraudulent. So I gave the matter little thought.

Only in the last dozen years, as my content-archiving project made me aware of the 1940s purge of some of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, and I began considering their books and articles, did I begin to realize the massive import of the Soviet cables. I soon read three or four of the Venona books and was very impressed by their objective and meticulous scholarly analysis, which convinced me of their conclusions. And the implications were quite remarkable, actually far understated in most of the articles that I had read.

Consider, for example, the name Harry Dexter White, surely unknown to all but the thinnest sliver of present-day Americans, and proven by the Venona Papers to have been a Soviet agent. During the 1940s, his official position was merely one of several assistant secretaries of the Treasury, serving under Henry Morgenthau, Jr., an influential member of Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet. But Morgenthau was actually a gentleman-farmer, almost entirely ignorant of finance, who had gotten his position partly by being FDR’s neighbor, and according to numerous sources, White actually ran the Treasury Department under his titular authority. Thus, in 1944 it was White who negotiated with John Maynard Keynes—Britain’s most towering economist—to lay the basis for the the Bretton Woods Agreement, the IMF, and the rest of the West’s post-war economic institutions.

Moreover, by the end of the war, White had managed to extend the power of the Treasury—and therefore his own area of control—deep into what would normally be handled by the Department of State, especially regarding policies pertaining to the defeated German foe. His handiwork notably included the infamous “Morgenthau Plan,” proposing the complete dismantling of the huge industrial base at the heart of Europe, and its conversion into an agricultural region, automatically implying the elimination of most of Germany’s population, whether by starvation or exodus. And although that proposal was officially abandoned under massive protest by the allied leadership, books by many post-war observers such as Freda Utley’s The High Cost of Vengeance have argued that it was partially implemented in actuality, with millions of German civilians perishing from hunger, sickness, and other consequences of extreme deprivation.

At the time, some observers believed that White’s attempt to eradicate much of prostrate Germany’s surviving population was vindictively motivated by his own Jewish background. But William Henry Chamberlin, long one of America’s most highly-regarded foreign policy journalists, strongly suspected that the plan was a deeply cynical one, intended to inflict such enormous misery upon those Germans living under Western occupation that popular sentiment would automatically shift in a strongly pro-Soviet direction, allowing Stalin to gain the upper hand in Central Europe, and many subsequent historians have come to similar conclusions.

Even more remarkably, White managed to have a full set of the plates used to print Allied occupation currency shipped to the Soviets, allowing them to produce an unlimited quantity of paper marks recognized as valid by Western governments, thus allowing the USSR to finance its post-war occupation of half of Europe on the backs of the American taxpayer.

Eventually suspicion of White’s true loyalties led to his abrupt resignation as the first U.S. Director of the IMF in 1947, and in 1948 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he denied all accusations, he was scheduled for additional testimony, with the intent of eventually prosecuting him for perjury and then using the threat of a long prison sentence to force him to reveal the other members of his espionage network. However, almost immediately after his initial meeting with the Committee, he supposedly suffered a couple of sudden heart attacks and died at age 55, though apparently no direct autopsy was performed on his corpse.

Soon afterward other Soviet spies also began departing this world at unripe ages within a short period of time. Two months after White’s demise, accused Soviet spy W. Marvin Smith was found dead at age 53 in the stairwell of the Justice building, having fallen five stories, and sixty days after that, Laurence Duggan, another agent of very considerable importance, lost his life at age 43 following a fall from the 16th floor of an office building in New York City. So many other untimely deaths of individuals of a similar background occurred during this general period that in 1951 the staunchly right-wing Chicago Tribune ran an entire article noting this rather suspicious pattern. But while I don’t doubt that the plentiful anti-Communist activists of that period exchanged dark interpretations of so many coincidental fatalities, I am not aware that such “conspiracy theories” were ever taken seriously by the more respectable mainstream media, and certainly no hint of this reached any of the standard history textbooks that constituted my primary knowledge of that period…

The particular timing of events may sometimes exert an outsize influence on historical trajectories. Consider the figure of Henry Wallace, probably still dimly remembered as a leading leftwing Democrat of the 1930s and 1940s. Wallace had been something of a Midwestern wonder-boy in farming innovation and was brought into FDR’s first Cabinet in 1933 as Secretary of Agriculture. By all accounts, Wallace was an absolutely 100% true-blue American patriot, with no hint of any nefarious activity appearing anywhere in the Venona Papers. But as is sometimes the case with technical experts, he seems to have been remarkably naive outside his main field of knowledge, notably in his extreme religious mysticism and more importantly in his politics, with many of those closest to him being proven Soviet agents, who presumably regarded him as the ideal front-man for their own political intrigues.

From George Washington onward, no American president had ever run for a third consecutive term, and when FDR suddenly decided to take this step during 1940, partly using the ongoing war in Europe as an excuse, many prominent figures in the Democratic Party launched a political rebellion, notably including his own two-time Vice President John Nance Garner, who had been a former Democratic Speaker of the House, and James Farley, the powerful party leader who had originally helped elevate Roosevelt to the presidency. FDR selected Wallace as his third-term Vice President, perhaps as a means of gaining support from the powerful pro-Soviet faction among the Democrats. But as a consequence, even as FDR’s health steadily deteriorated during the four years that followed, an individual whose most trusted advisors were agents of Stalin remained just a heartbeat away from the American presidency.

Under the strong pressure of Democratic Party leaders, Wallace was replaced on the ticket at the July 1944 Democratic Convention, and Harry S. Truman succeeded to the presidency when FDR died in April of the following year. But if Wallace had not been replaced or if Roosevelt had died a year earlier, the consequences for the country would surely have been enormous. According to later statements, a Wallace Administration would have included Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State, Harry Dexter White at the helm of the Treasury, and presumably various other outright Soviet agents occupying all the key nodes at the top of the American federal government. One might jokingly speculate whether the Rosenbergs—later executed for treason—would have been placed in charge of our nuclear weapons development program.

As it happens, Roosevelt lived until 1945, and instead of running the American government on behalf of Stalin, Duggan and White both died quite suddenly within a few months of each other after they came under suspicion in 1948. But the tendrils of Soviet control during the early 1940s ran remarkably deep.

As a striking example, Soviet agents became aware of the Venona decryption project in 1944, and soon afterward a directive came down from the White House ordering the project abandoned and the records of Soviet espionage destroyed. The only reason that Venona survived, allowing us to later reconstruct the fateful politics of that era, was that the military officer in charge risked a court-martial by simply ignoring that explicit Presidential order.

In the wake of the Venona Papers, publicly released a quarter century ago and today accepted by almost everyone, it seems undeniable that during the early 1940s America’s national government came within a hair’s breadth—or rather a heartbeat—of falling under the control of a tight network of Soviet agents. Yet I have only very rarely seen this simple fact emphasized in any book or article, even though this surely helps explain the ideological roots of the “anti-Communist paranoia” that became such a powerful political force by the early 1950s.

Obviously, Communism had very shallow roots in American society, and any Soviet-dominated Wallace Administration established in 1943 or 1944 probably would sooner or later have been swept from power, perhaps by America’s first military coup. But given FDR’s fragile health, this momentous possibility should certainly be regularly mentioned in discussions of that era.

• American Pravda: Our Deadly World of Post-War Politics
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 2, 2018 • 5,700 Words

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All of Kellogg’s underlying assumptions lacked any basis in reality. Yet Trump seemingly took them on trust.

Political warfare in Washington is endemic. But the body count at the Pentagon has started to rise precipitously. Three of Secretary of Defence Hegseth’s top advisors were placed on leave, and then fired. The war continues, with the Secretary now in the firing line.

Why this matters is that the Hegseth attrition comes amid fierce internal debates in the Trump administration about Iran policy. Hawks want an definitive elimination of all Iran’s nuclear and weapons capabilities, whilst many ‘restrainers’ warn against military escalation; Hegseth reportedly was amongst those warning against an intervention in Iran.

The recent Pentagon dismissals have all been identified as restrainers. One of the latter, Dan Caldwell, formerly Hegseth’s Top Adviser and an army veteran, wrote a post slamming the ‘Iran Hawks’ – and subsequently was fired. He was later interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Notably, Caldwell describes in scathing terms America’s wars in Iraq and Syria (“criminal”). This adverse sentiment concerning America’s earlier wars is a rising theme, it seems, amongst U.S. Vets today.

The three Pentagon staffers essentially were fired, not as ‘leakers’, but for talking Hegseth out of supporting war on Iran, it would appear; the Israeli-Firsters, have not given up on that war.

The inflamed fault lines between hawks and traditionalist ‘Republicans’ bleed across into the Ukraine issue, even if the faction membership may alter a tad. Israeli-Firsters and U.S. hawks more generally, are behind both the war on Russia and the maximalist demands on Iran.

Conservative commentator Fred Bauer observes that when it comes to Trump’s own war impulses, they are conflicted:

“Influenced by the Vietnam War of his youth … Trump seems deeply averse to long-term military conflicts, yet, at the same time, Trump admires a politics of strength and swagger. That means taking out Iranian generals, launching airstrikes on the Houthis, and boosting the defence budget to $1 trillion”.

Hegseth’s potential exit – should the campaign for his removal succeed – could cause the struggle to grow fiercer. Its first casualty is already apparent – Trump’s hope to bring a quick end to the Ukraine conflict is over.

This week, the Trump team (including both warring factions, Rubio, Witkoff and General Kellogg) met in Paris with various European and Ukrainian representatives. At the meeting, a Russian-Ukrainian unilateral ceasefire proposal was mooted by the U.S. delegation.

After the meeting, at the airport, Rubio plainly said that the ceasefire plan was ‘a take-it-or-leave-it’ U.S. initiative. The various sides – Russia, Kiev and the European members of the ‘coalition of the willing’ – had only days to accept it, or else the U.S. was ‘out’, and would wash its hands of the conflict.

The framework presented, as reported, is almost (maybe 95%) unadulteratedly that previously proposed by General Kellogg: i.e. it is his plan, first aired in April 2024. It appears that the ‘Kellogg formula’ was adopted then as the Trump platform (Trump was at the time in mid-campaign, and unlikely to have been following the complicated minutiae of the Ukraine war too closely).

General Kellogg is also the likely source for Trump’s optimism that the ending to the Ukraine war could come with a click of Trump’s fingers – through the limited application of asymmetric pressures and threats on both belligerents by Trump – and with the timing decided in Washington.

In short, the plan represented a Beltway consensus that the U.S. could implement a negotiated end-state with terms aligned to U.S. and Ukrainian interests.

Kellogg’s implicit assumptions were that Russia is highly vulnerable to a sanctions threat (its economy perceived as being fragile); that it had suffered unsustainably high casualties; and that the war was at a stalemate.

Thus, Kellogg persuaded Trump that Russia would readily agree to the ceasefire terms proposed – albeit terms that were constructed around patently flawed underlying assumptions about Russia and its presumed weaknesses.

Kellogg’s influence and false premises were all too evident when Trump, in January, having stated that Russia had lost one million men (in the war) then went on to say that “Putin is destroying Russia by not making a deal, adding (seemingly as an aside), that Putin may have already made up his mind ‘not to make a deal’”. He further claimed that Russia’s economy is in ‘ruins’, and most notably said that he would consider sanctioning or tariffing Russia. In a subsequent Truth Social post, Trump writes, “I’m going to do Russia – whose Economy is failing – and President Putin, a very big FAVOR”.

All of Kellogg’s underlying assumptions lacked any basis in reality. Yet Trump seemingly took them on trust. And despite Steve Witkoff’s subsequent three lengthy personal meetings with President Putin, in which Putin repeatedly stated that he would not accept any ceasefire until a political framework had been first agreed, the Kellogg contingent continued to blandly assume that Russia would be forced to accept Kellogg’s détente because of the claimed serious ‘setbacks’ Russia had suffered in Ukraine.

Given this history, unsurprisingly, the ceasefire framework terms outlined by Rubio this week in Paris reflected those more suited to a party at the point of capitulation, rather than that of a state anticipating achieving its objectives – by military means.

In essence, the Kellogg Plan looked to bring a U.S. ‘win’ on terms aligned to a desire to keep open the option for continuing attritional war on Russia.

So, what is the Kellogg Plan? At base, it seeks to establish a ‘frozen conflict’ – frozen along the ‘Line of Conflict’; with no definitive ban on NATO membership for Ukraine, (but rather, envisaging a NATO membership that is deferred well into the future); it places no limits on the size of a future Ukrainian army and no restrictions on the type or quantity of armaments held by the Ukrainian forces. (It foresees, contrarily, that after the ceasefire, the U.S. might re-arm, train and militarily support a future force) – i.e. back to the post-Maidan era of 2014.

In addition, no territory would be ceded by Ukraine to Russia, save for Crimea which alone would be recognised by the U.S. as Russian (the unique sop to Witkoff?), and Russia would only ‘exercise control’ over the four Oblasts that it currently claims, yet only up to the Line of Conflict; territory beyond this line would remain under Ukrainian control (see here for the ‘Kellogg map’). The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant would be neutral territory to be held, and managed, by the U.S. There is no mention made of the cities of Zaporozhye and Kherson that have been constitutionally incorporated into Russia, but lie beyond the contact line.

Nothing about a political solution apparently was outlined in the plan, and the plan leaves Ukraine free to pursue its claim to all Ukraine’s former territories – save for only Crimea.

Ukrainian territory west of the Dnieper River however, would be divided into three zones of responsibility: British, French and German zones (i.e. which NATO forces would manage). Finally, no American security guarantees were offered.

Rubio subsequently passed details of the plan to Russian FM Lavrov, who calmly stated that any ceasefire plan should resolve the underlying causes to the conflict in Ukraine as its first task.

Witkoff flies to Moscow this week to present this ‘pig’s ear’ of a plan to Putin – seeking his consent. The Europeans and Ukrainians are set to meet next Wednesday in London to give their riposte to Trump.

What’s next? Most obviously, the Kellogg Plan will not ‘fly’. Russia will not accept it, and likely Zelensky will not either, (though the Europeans will work to persuade him – hoping to ‘wrong-foot Moscow’ by presenting Russia as the essential ‘spoiler’). Reportedly, Zelensky already has rejected the Crimea provision.

For the Europeans, the lack of security guarantees or backstop by the U.S. may prove to be a killer for their aspiration to deploy a tripwire troop deployment to Ukraine, in the context of a ceasefire.

Is Trump really going to wash his hands of Ukraine? Doubtful, given that the U.S. neo-conservative institutional leadership will tell Trump that to do so, would weaken America’s ‘peace through strength’ narrative. Trump may adopt supporting Ukraine ‘on a low flame’ posture, whilst declaring the ‘war was never his’ – as he seeks a ‘win’ on the business front with Russia.

The bottom line is that Kellogg has not well-served his patron. The U.S. needs effective working relations with Russia. The Kellogg contingent has contributed to Trump’s egregious misreading of Russia. Putin is a serious actor, who says what he means, and means what he says.

Colonel Macgregor sums it up thus:

“Trump tends to view the world through the lens of dealmaking. [Ending the Ukraine war] is not about dealmaking. This is about the life and death of nations and peoples. There’s no interest in some sort of short-fused deal that is going to elevate Trump or his administration to greatness. There will be no win for Donald Trump personally in any of this. That was never going to be the case”.

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

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Artificial intelligence might be creeping its way into every facet of our lives — but that doesn’t mean it’s making us smarter.

Quite the reverse. A new analysis of recent research by The Guardian looked at a potential irony: whether we’re giving up more than we gain by shoehorning AI into our day-to-day work, offloading so many intellectual tasks that it erodes our own cognitive abilities.

The analysis points to a number of studies that suggest a link between cognitive decline and AI tools, especially in critical thinking. One research article, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology — and itself run through ChatGPT to make “corrections,” according to a disclaimer that we couldn’t help but notice — suggests that regular use of AI may cause our actual cognitive chops and memory capacity to atrophy.

Another study, by Michael Gerlich of the Swiss Business School in the journal Societies, points to a link between “frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities,” highlighting what Gerlich calls the “cognitive costs of AI tool reliance.”

The researcher uses an example of AI in healthcare, where automated systems make a hospital more efficient at the cost of full-time professionals whose job is “to engage in independent critical analysis” — to make human decisions, in other words.

None of that is as far-fetched as it sounds. A broad body of research has found that brain power is a “use it or lose it” asset, so it makes sense that turning to ChatGPT for everyday challenges like writing tricky emails, doing research, or solving problems would have negative results.

As humans offload increasingly complex problems onto various AI models, we also become prone to treating AI like a “magic box,” a catch-all capable of doing all our hard thinking for us. This attitude is heavily pushed by the AI industry, which uses a blend of buzzy technical terms and marketing hype to sell us on ideas like “deep learning,” “reasoning,” and “artificial general intelligence.”

Case in point, another recent study found that a quarter of Gen Zers believe AI is “already conscious.” By scraping thousands of publicly available datapoints in seconds, AI chatbots can spit out seemingly thoughtful prose, which certainly gives the appearance of human-like sentience. But it’s that exact attitude that experts warn is leading us down a dark path.

Read the Whole Article

The post Experts Concerned That AI Is Making Us Stupider appeared first on LewRockwell.

The nerds who brought us the digital revolution did so without any thought to the obvious consequences.  Americans addicted to scrolling their cell phones and enjoying social media are suffering from the numerous threats that the digital revolution brings to them.  Not just government spying on them and, if government wishes, setting them up for prosecution.  Not just from being dispossessed of their identity and left with massive bills.  Not just from theft of their bank and retirement accounts. The digital revolution allows thieves to steal our homes. 

Assuming it is not another hoax, the Daily Mail provides the FBI’s account of how it works.

To protect yourself from the easy theft of your home, you should sign up for a notification alert at the registry of deeds, which will alert you when a document is recorded for your property.  You are most vulnerable if your property is debt free with no mortgage.  If you have no mortgage, take out a small one as your property cannot be transferred from your ownership until the mortgage is paid, if my understanding is correct.  So having to clear a mortgage provides you with a warning that your home is in the process of being stolen.

The digital revolution is the worst thing except for nuclear weapons that humans have ever devised. The Tech morons who gave us this disaster failed to anicipate the disastrous consequences of their work.

Read the report here.

PUBLISHED: 18:27 EDT, 26 April 2025 | UPDATED: 02:04 EDT, 27 April 2025

Urgent FBI warning about cruel scam suffered by thousands that leaves you with just 24 hours to save your home

The FBI is sending an urgent warning to homeowners to be aware of ‘title theft,’ the latest of various moves fraudsters make in order to steal a property owner’s identity and sell their land out from under them. 

The land theft is on the rise, with the FBI saying the scammers tend to prey on the elderly.

‘Our elderly population [are more at risk] because they are more likely to own vacant pieces of land that they have had for quite some time, and they are also more likely to own homes without any mortgages on them,’ FBI Special Agent Vivian Barrios told CBS.

‘Because those have the biggest benefit to the criminal actor.’

In Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, 2,301 victims lost more than $61.5 million from 2019 to 2023.

According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, nationwide, from 2019 through 2023, 58,141 victims reported $1.3 billion in losses relating to real estate fraud.

In the Boston Division – which includes all of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island – during the same period, 2,301 victims reported losing more than $61.5 million. In Maine 262 victims lost $6,253,008. In Massachusetts, 1,576 people lost $46,269,818. In New Hampshire 239 people lost $4,144,467. In Rhode Island 224 people lost a combined $4,852,220. 

Time is of the essence and as soon as a victim finds out this has happened, they need to report it, ideally within 24-hours. That makes it easier for the feds to get the money back to the victims.

Plymouth, Massachusetts resident John Grimes got a call from a local attorney about his ‘sale.’

Title pirates got Plymouth, MA, resident John Grimes, who nearly lost his home after he found out it was for sale.

Grimes bought his home six years ago but in September 2024 got a call from local attorney Alan Sharaf informing him his home was for sale. Grimes was shocked.

He filed a fraud report with the FBI. He also signed up for a notification alert at the registry of deeds. That alert is free and will let him know when a document is recorded for his property.

Sharaf said he was looking at a purchase and sale agreement that was supposedly signed by Grimes. He wanted to make sure he was actually selling the home to the ‘buyer,’ who was located in Montreal and had made an all cash over. No one ever answered the phone number listed for the buyer.

Grimes loves his home, which backs onto a cranberry bog, isn’t selling it, and never signed sale papers. 

‘I got a phone call from a lawyer just outside of Boston and he had gotten a request asking him to facilitate a closing with an e-signature. And everything was all set. But it wasn’t my real signature,’ Grimes told the Daily Mail. 

Grimes said if he hadn’t gotten that call, it would have been too late. The lawyer told him that another attorney would have shown up at the registry of deeds, filed a record of a fraudulent deed by Grimes, and he would have had his house taken away. He would have gotten it back but only after months of fighting and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. 

‘He advised me to check my credit, contact the FBI, which I did immediately and I had to give them a bunch of detailed information,’ Grimes says. 

‘The bank looks, oh you’ve got a deed, it’s been recorded at the registry as a sale,’ Grimes says.

Once the sale was flagged as fraudulent, the ‘buyers’ disappeared. 

The FBI explained to Grimes how exactly these scammers pull this off. Because most contracts today are done electronically, it’s easy for thieves to do.

First they target a property in the US at random. They send a fake deed they’ve made electronically to a local lawyer they ‘hire’ to ‘close’ on the sale. 

If they’re lucky the lawyer will do business as usual, easily sign off on it, and send them back a purchase and sale agreement. The scammers then claim to the bank that they rushed to pay all cash in competition with other buyers, and now want to take out a loan, which often gets approved because the house is an asset they now ‘own.’ Then they run away with the loan cash, which oftentimes is hundreds of thousands of dollars.

‘You’re the owner. They get a loan and take off with the money. And then I would get a notice that there’s an overdue loan on my property,’ he added.

The FBI has since sent out a note to realtors and homeowners about the scam, and told elderly people especially to be aware. 

Lisa Vesperman Still, a title underwriter and past president of the New England Land Title Association, said the scammers are so sophisticated with technology it’s become easy to dupe lawyers who are bogged down with work or in a rush.

‘Seller impersonation fraud by title pirates is happening quite a bit now, and unfortunately a landowner doesn’t often know until the deed from the fraudster to the innocent purchaser gets recorded,’ Still told the Daily Mail.

‘The fraudsters also impersonate vacant land owners, owners of empty vacation rentals or second homes that are mortgage free, using fake identification and information combed from public websites, and reach out to unsuspecting real estate agents wanting to sell “their” property.’

She adds they state it all has to be done remotely, that they can’t meet or appear on a video chat – and certainly can’t come to the closing. 

‘Any ID they provide is a very well done forgery, there are often features on the fake ID that are slightly off from an authentic one, but so slightly off that one has to very closely examine every feature. They need their money wired, and want the property sold quickly, almost always at a price well below market value,’ she added.

Seller impersonation fraud and title piracy are just two of the types of real estate fraud included within those statistics.

The National Association of Realtors has offered tips to help real estate agents and homeowners avoid getting caught in this scam.

Avoid remote closings, if possible, they advise. Ask for in-person identity checks. Request copies of documents that only the property owner would have, including a copy of the most recent tax bill, utility bill, or survey from when the property was purchased, in addition to the individual’s ID.

Send a certified letter to the address of record on the tax bill. Look up the phone number by reverse search or through the phone carrier. Call to verify the public notary and confirm he/she attested to the documents.

They also suggest homeowners sign up for a notification alert at the registry of deeds, which will alert someone when a document is recorded for their property.

The post Yet another Disastrous Consequence of the Digital Revolution appeared first on LewRockwell.

(Read part 1 here)

The decade of 2000 marked the start of Ukraine becoming a de facto member of NATO. It not only participated in all of the main exercises, but it hosted many. In fact, between 2000 and 2010, Ukraine is ranked in the top six of countries that hosted a NATO or USEUCOM exercise. Ukraine and Georgia, who was ranked number seven, were not NATO members. What the hell? Two non-NATO countries hosted more NATO exercises than 22 of the member nations. This is prima facie evidence that the West, despite warnings from Russia, was intent on making Ukraine and Georgia official members of NATO.

Only two things distinguished Ukraine from NATO members — it did not have a financial obligation to contribute to NATO and it was not covered by Article 5. Other than that, Ukraine was operating as a de facto member of NATO by 2010.

Project Ukraine was not confined to military cooperation alone. US and UK intelligence organizations were actively involved in Ukraine and were coordinating operations and activities with both NATO and EUCOM. The CIA, for example, has intelligence officers assigned to NATO and USEUCOM headquarters. There job is to brief senior leaders on CIA operations and coordinate activities to ensure no wires get crossed. With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that during the period between 2000 and 2010, the US government, with collaboration from the UK, was working intently to split Ukraine away from Russia’s sphere of influence and capture it for the West.

Note: My chats with Nima and Judge Napolitano are posted at the end of this article.

2000

Cooperative Partner 2000:

The principal NATO-led military exercise conducted with Ukraine in 2000 was Exercise Cooperative Partner 2000. This exercise took place from 19 June to 1 July 2000 in the Black Sea and the area around Odessa, Ukraine. The exercise involved forces from NATO’s Standing Naval Force Mediterranean (STANAVFORMED) and the Standing Mine Counter-Measures Force Mediterranean (MCMFORMED), along with participants from ten NATO countries and six partner nations. Russia attended as an observer. The main objective was to train multinational forces to work together for peace support operations, enhancing interoperability and cooperation between NATO and partner countries.

Peace Shield 2000 (May–June 2000)

• Type: Command Post Exercise (CPX) + Field Training
• Participants:
  • Ukraine (primary host)
  • NATO/PfP: U.S., UK, Germany, Poland, Canada, and others.
  • Observed by: Russia (under PfP, despite tensions over NATO-Ukraine cooperation).
• Objectives:
  • Train for multinational peacekeeping operations (e.g., Kosovo-style scenarios).
  • Improve C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence) interoperability.
  • Test Ukraine’s ability to integrate with NATO-standard procedures.
• Notable Elements:

Cooperative Determination 2000 (September 2000)

• Type: Maritime/Search-and-Rescue (SAR) Exercise
• Location: Odessa and Black Sea waters
• Participants:
  • Naval forces: Ukraine, U.S. (USS Yorktown), Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia.
  • USEUCOM provided P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft.
• Objectives:
  • Counter-piracy, SAR, and maritime interdiction operations.
  • First major Black Sea exercise with Ukraine post-Cold War.
• Political Context:Russia criticized the exercise as “NATO expansionism” but participated as an observer.
• Demonstrated Ukraine’s push for Black Sea security partnerships amid rising regional tensions.

Cossack Steppe 2000 (Summer 2000)

• Type: Bilateral Field Training Exercise (FTX)
• Location: Desna Training Center (Chernihiv Oblast) & other sites
• Participants: Ukrainian Army + U.S. Army Europe (USAREUR) advisors.
• Focus:
  • Peacekeeping tactics (e.g., convoy security, checkpoint operations).
  • Medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) and combat engineer drills.
• Legacy:
  • Part of the U.S.-Ukraine Joint Contact Team Program (JCTP), launched in 1994 to aid Ukraine’s military reform.
  • Paved the way for future exercises like Rapid Trident (post-2006).

In 2000, the United States European Command (USEUCOM) executed its first Military Contact Plan with Ukraine, following the transfer of responsibility for U.S. military engagement in Ukraine from the Joint Staff to EUCOM in late 1998. The 2000 plan was developed collaboratively with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and included a variety of military-to-military events, such as planning meetings, medical, legal, and chaplain exchanges, and other cooperative activities. These events were designed to align with specific objectives and priorities identified by both sides.

2001

Cossack Express 2001 (April–May 2001)

• Location: Ukraine (multiple sites)
• Participants: Ukrainian forces, U.S. Army Europe (USAREUR), and NATO advisors.
• Focus: Logistics, medical training, and crisis response.
• Significance: Aimed at improving Ukraine’s ability to support international peacekeeping missions.

Sea Breeze 2001 (July 16–27, 2001)

• Location: Black Sea (near Odessa and Crimea, Ukraine)
• Participants: Ukraine, U.S. (USEUCOM/NATO), and other NATO partners.
• Focus: Maritime security, search and rescue (SAR), anti-submarine warfare (ASW), and amphibious operations.
• Significance: Part of the annual “Sea Breeze” series (started in 1997), enhancing interoperability between Ukraine and NATO.

Cooperative Determination 2001 (September 2001)

• Location: Yavoriv Training Area, Ukraine (near Lviv)
• Participants: Ukraine, U.S. (USEUCOM), and NATO allies.
• Focus: Peacekeeping operations (PKO), command post exercises (CPX), and joint maneuvers.
• Significance: Part of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, improving Ukraine’s readiness for multinational operations.

Clear Sky 2001 (October 2001)

• Location: Starokostiantyniv Air Base, Ukraine
• Participants: Ukrainian Air Force, U.S. Air Force (USAFE), and NATO partners.
• Focus: Air defense, search and rescue (SAR), and airspace coordination.
• Significance: Strengthened Ukraine’s air force interoperability with NATO standards.

2002

Cossack Express 2002″ (March–April 2002)

• Location: Ukraine (multiple regions)
• Participants: Ukrainian National Guard, U.S. National Guard (State Partnership Program), and other NATO advisors.
• Focus: Disaster response, counter-terrorism, and crisis management.
• Significance: Strengthened civil-military cooperation and emergency response coordination.

Cooperative Partner 2002″ (June 2002)

• Location: Yavoriv Training Area (Lviv region, Ukraine)
• Participants: Ukraine, U.S. (USEUCOM), NATO members (including Poland, Germany, Canada), and Partnership for Peace (PfP) countries.
• Focus: Peacekeeping operations (PKO), command-post exercises (CPX), joint staff coordination.
• Significance: Part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, aimed at preparing Ukrainian forces for potential NATO-led peacekeeping missions.

Sea Breeze 2002 (July–August 2002)

• Location: Black Sea (near Odesa and Mykolaiv, Ukraine)
• Participants: Ukraine, U.S. (USEUCOM/NATO), and other NATO allies (including Turkey, UK, Greece, etc.)
• Focus: Maritime security, amphibious operations, search and rescue (SAR), anti-submarine warfare (ASW).
• Significance: Part of the annual “Sea Breeze” series (ongoing since 1997), enhancing interoperability between Ukraine and NATO naval forces.

Other Engagements:

• Ukraine also participated in NATO/PfP exercises such as “Cooperative Key” (a command-post exercise) and “Cooperative Nugget”, focusing on interoperability in peace support operations.

2003

In 2003, Ukraine participated in several notable military exercises with NATO and U.S. European Command (USEUCOM), reflecting its growing partnership with the Alliance and Western militaries. Some key exercises included:

Cooperative Archer 2003 (June 2003 – Lithuania)

• A NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) exercise focused on peacekeeping operations.
• Involved Ukrainian troops training alongside NATO forces in command post and field exercises.
• Aimed at enhancing interoperability between NATO and partner nations.

Sea Breeze 2003 (July 2003 – Black Sea, Ukraine)

• A U.S.-Ukraine co-led maritime exercise under the Partnership for Peace program.
• Focused on naval interoperability, search and rescue (SAR), and anti-submarine warfare (ASW).
• Participating nations included the U.S. (USEUCOM), Ukraine, NATO allies, and other partners.

Cossack Express 2003 (September 2003 – Ukraine)

• A command post exercise (CPX) involving Ukrainian forces and NATO/PfP partners.
• Focused on crisis response and peace support operations.
• Part of Ukraine’s efforts to align its military doctrines with NATO standards.

Combined Endeavor 2003 (September-October 2003 – Germany)

• A large-scale communications and interoperability exercise led by USEUCOM.
• Ukrainian forces participated alongside NATO and partner nations to improve military data-sharing and command systems.

Clear Sky 2003 (October 2003 – Ukraine)

• A joint air defense exercise involving Ukrainian, U.S., and other NATO/PfP forces.
• Focused on airspace coordination and air-missile defense cooperation.

In March 2003, Ukraine finalized its 2003 Target Plan within the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan framework. This plan provided for intensified military cooperation, consultations, and preparation for large-scale military exercises, including international ones. These activities were part of a broader effort to align Ukraine’s military standards and procedures with those of NATO, as well as to test military equipment and armaments
in a multinational context.

2004

In 2004, Ukraine participated in several significant military exercises with NATO and U.S. European Command (USEUCOM), reflecting its growing partnership with the Alliance and Western militaries following the 2002 NATO-Ukraine Action Plan. Key exercises included:

Cossack Express 2004 (Spring 2004)

• Location: Yavoriv Training Area, Lviv Oblast (Western Ukraine)
• Participants: Ukraine, U.S. Army Europe (USEUCOM), and NATO partners.
• Ukrainian Participants: 24th Mechanized Brigade (Yavoriv) – Trained with U.S. Army Europe’s 1st Infantry Division on peacekeeping logistics.
• National Guard Units – Drilled on crowd control (later relevant during the Orange Revolution protests).
• NATO Link: The Yavoriv Training Area later became the Combat Training Center for NATO partners (2015 onward).
• Focus: Peacekeeping drills, command post exercises (CPX), and logistical coordination.
• Significance: Aimed at preparing Ukrainian troops for potential contributions to NATO-led missions (e.g., Kosovo or Iraq).

Rapid Answer 2004 (June 2004)

• Location: Poland and Ukraine (joint border areas)
• Participants: Ukraine, Poland (a newly NATO-acceded member), and other Allied forces.
• Focus: Rapid deployment, crisis response, and interoperability with NATO forces.
• Significance: Demonstrated Ukraine’s role in regional security alongside NATO’s eastern flank.

Sea Breeze 2004 (July–August 2004)

• Location: Black Sea (Odessa and Crimea regions)
• Participants: Ukraine, U.S. Navy (USEUCOM), NATO allies (including Turkey, UK, France), and partner nations.
• Focus: Maritime security, anti-terrorism, search-and-rescue (SAR), and naval interoperability.
• Significance: Part of the annual “Sea Breeze” series (ongoing since 1997), enhancing Black Sea regional security cooperation.

Cooperative Determination 2004 (August 2004)

• Location: Crimea, Ukraine (Feodosia training area)
• Participants: Ukrainian Armed Forces, NATO members (including the U.S., UK, Germany, Poland, and others)
• Focus: Peacekeeping operations, interoperability with NATO standards.
• Significance: Part of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, emphasizing joint command structures and crisis response.

Political Fallout & Long-Term Impact

• Russian Reaction:
  • Moscow accused NATO of “encroachment” and pressured Ukraine to join the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) instead.
• Domestic Divide:
  • Pro-Western factions (e.g., Viktor Yushchenko’s bloc) praised the drills, while pro-Russian groups (Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions) opposed them.
• 2008 NATO Summit:
  • Ukraine’s 2004 exercises built momentum for its eventual Membership Action Plan (MAP) bid, though blocked by German/French hesitancy.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Road to War in Ukraine — The History of NATO and US Military Exercises With Ukraine — Part 2 appeared first on LewRockwell.

Virginia Giuffre died yesterday. They say she committed suicide. They say that about a lot of whistleblowers and inconvenient witnesses. Giuffre was perhaps the most high profile victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. Prince Andrew was among those she was trafficked to. She was a brave person who is hopefully at peace.

Virginia was treated like most threats to the rich and powerful have always been treated. She wouldn’t be silent after she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” by wealthy, decadent predators. High profile attorney Alan Dershowitz, whom she alleged was one of her abusers, called her a “liar, perjurer, and extortionist.” He even filed a counter lawsuit against her. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be a cute teenager. When horny men of means are tempted, they usually get what they want. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s twisted Girl Friday, sounded like a true Mean Girl in one snippy comment found in a sealed document from her 2016 deposition, “I would never — the outfit doesn’t work at all so…I did not take her shopping.” Maxwell was referring to the outfit in the infamous photo above, which depicts Prince Andrew with his arm around a teenage Virginia’s waist, while Ghislaine is beaming behind her.

At the beginning of this month, stories broke that Virginia was hospitalized, and was being given “four days to live” after a suspicious crash with a school bus. The former Virginia Roberts wanted to see her children one last time, and commented, “But I think it’s important to note that when a school bus driver comes at you driving 110kmh as we were slowing down for a turn, that no matter what your car is made of, it might as well be a tin can.” A photo of Virginia, presumably from her hospital bed, showed her severely bruised face. Virginia’s publicist declared, “Virginia has been in a serious accident and is receiving medical care in the hospital. She greatly appreciates the support and well wishes people are sending.” A few days later, Australian police released a statement calling the incident “minor” with no reported injuries. Speculation was that Virginia was trying to appeal to her estranged children.

Then reports appeared featuring remarks from parents of the children involved in the “minor” bus crash. “The whole story is sick and I don’t know what’s true and what is not but I do know [the injuries] are not from the bus incident,” one mother was quoted as saying. “It’s lies. I don’t know what she is trying to get from all of it . . . but I do feel bad for her and I hope she gets help.” Virginia was living on an Australian farm, and had gone through an acrimonious divorce after 22 years of marriage and three children. The mother stated that she was “disgusted” by Virginia’s bedside selfie, but didn’t seem curious about the condition of her face, which resembled the classic look of an abused woman. All that was missing was the wife-beater. Maybe she ran into a non-Royal door. Stories claimed that she had breached a “family violence restraining order.” Perhaps it was a case of “you should see the other guy.”

Prince Andrew had settled out of court after Giuffre filed a lawsuit, for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum. While denying any wrongdoing, a statement from Andrew said that he “regrets his association with Epstein, and commends the bravery of Ms Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others.” The Royal once known as “Randy Andy” has always been the black sheep of Buckingham Palace. Remember Koo Stark, the soft porn star? And his frequenting an S & M club? Virginia’s legal team noted that at the time she was trafficked, she was a “frightened, vulnerable child with no one there to protect her” and that “no person, whether President or Prince, is above the law.” I think it’s been established that Presidents and Princes, along with CEOs, clueless celebrities, 85 IQ professional athletes, and attorneys like Alan Dershowitz, are indeed all very much above the law.

In a haunting December 10, 2019 tweet, Virginia had emphatically declared, “I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal. I have made this known to my therapist and GP- if something happens to me for the sake of my family do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many people want to see me quieted.” Feisty Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took to Twitter on April 25, 2025, declaring, “Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre has died by ‘suicide.’ The truth needs to come out no matter who is responsible.” Sen. Mike Lee bluntly stated, “Virginia Roberts Giuffre didn’t commit suicide. No chance.” Former Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted, “Imagine believing this was actually suicide….” Well, I remember how everyone– including most of the state controlled media- scoffed at Epstein’s own alleged “suicide.” But as usual, nothing happened. Ghislaine Maxwell refused to name names, and was convicted of trafficking minors to unknown men.

Lady Victoria Hervey, best known for having a brief fling with Virginia’s accused abuser Prince Andrew, responded to the “suicide” by stating, “When lies catch up to you there’s no way out.” Hervey had previously taunted Virginia about “what goes around comes around,” and superimposed the word “Karma” over the photo of her with the bruised face. You’d think someone with the title of “Lady” would have more class than that. Let’s compare Virginia’s claims to that of the bizarre E. Jean Carroll, who alleged Donald Trump had raped her some time in the 1990s- she couldn’t remember what year it happened- in an upscale department store changing room. Carroll joked about sex with Trump online, had a cat named “Tits,” and painted the trees in her yard blue. How could a jury not believe her and award her millions? I don’t think she could produce a photo of Trump with his arm around her waist, the way Virginia did. I guess some rape allegations are more equal than others.

Virginia’s declaration that she would never kill herself evoked memories of the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called “DC Madam” who briefly achieved some renown over her “black book” of high profile clients. After one of her girls, I think she was fittingly named “Bambi,” killed herself, a frightened Palfrey went on Alex Jones’s show in 2008 and reiterated that she was not suicidal, and to not believe it if she “killed herself.” Shockingly, she went on to supposedly do just that, shortly afterwards. No more was heard of her “black book,” and none of her celebrated clients were ever revealed. Kind of like how none of those on that still hidden Epstein list were ever prosecuted. After Giuffre admitted in 2022, that she “may have made a mistake” in claiming Dershowtiz abused her, Jeffrey Epstein’s one time receptionist Maria Farmer, who’d been the first to alert the authorities to his trafficking operation, said that Virginia acted out of “fear” and only dropped the lawsuit for her own “safety.”

Farmer defended Giuffre, saying, “Alan Dershowitz has done everything in his power since 2006 to defend all of his friends. Since 2006, we have been dealing with the wrath of that man. I’m deeply worried about Virginia’s safety at this time. She is an incredible woman who has faced demons….Anyone who knows this case knows Dershowitz has been a major player the entire time. From helping Epstein get a sweetheart deal, he has been busy….Now I believe she is being pressured. I wasn’t at the negotiating table, yet I know Virginia has never lied!” Looks like Farmer was right to worry about her friend’s “safety.” Looks like it was pointless for Virginia, as it was for Deborah Jeane Palfrey, to recognize the real threat that she might be silenced, and to publicly maintain she would never take her own life. No one believes Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. Except those who officially “investigated” the incident.

Read the Whole Article

The post Virginia Giuffre: Another Casualty of the State appeared first on LewRockwell.

Woke liberalism is exactly what Christopher Lasch predicted in The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995 the year after his early death at 61. Lasch saw how the juvenile idealism of Boomer hippiedom would slide into the narcissistic, sado-masochistic degeneracy of open borders, drag queen story hours, Covid-19 despotism, DEI racism, showbiz Satanism, censorship, forever wars, and now, the legal insurrection of lawfare.

In doing so, Lasch also predicted the “mass formation psychosis” described by Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet, spawned by a crisis of meaning and purpose in the thinking classes of Western Civ. And now you know exactly how come a place like Boston, with its concentration of “elites” in universities, computer tech, and medical research displays a batshit-crazy dedication to ideas bent on destroying our political culture: the American republic.

The word republic derives from the Latin, res publica: the public thing, the idea of a state dedicated to the common good. By “state” you can infer both a group of people in a certain place, but also the set of conditions they dwell in. You can’t have a common good without a common culture, which means a general agreement among citizens on values in that certain place — which is our country, the USA.

You can’t overstate the importance of shared ideas and values in that enterprise of being a nation, we-the-people in our particular place. The juvenile idealism of Boomer hippiedom wrecked the crucial idea of a common culture, and I will tell you exactly how that happened. Two crusades: first, the civil rights campaign, and second, stopping the War in Vietnam, defined the era.

The first of these climaxed in twin landmark legislative acts designed to abolish Jim Crow racism: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination in public places, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited unfair obstacles to voting. The idealism in that moment of history was extreme. The dominant old-school Liberal ethos displayed a sense of triumph. Its cardinal belief in human progress was validated in the new law-of-the-land. We were supposedly entering a utopia of racial harmony.

It proved to be a huge disappointment, a failure. In some fundamental ways, black and white America could not agree on certain values, especially language and behavior. These matters were so hypersensitive that discussing them became taboo, and when someone dared to — such as the rogue journalist Tom Wolfe in his book Radical Chic, which made fun of the cultural elites trying to socialize with the Black Panthers — he was buried in the most extreme censorious opprobrium by the elite good-thinkers of politics, academia, and the cultural media. They couldn’t believe old Tom dove clear through the Overton Window the way he did, head first.

In fact, a big segment of black America after 1965 became much more overtly separatist and oppositional, while white America became more frantically confounded and depressed by it. The result was the elite’s solution to that quandary: multiculturalism! Which basically meant: we don’t need a common culture in the USA. (We don’t need an agreement about values, language, and behavior.) Each group in America can have its own menu of these things. This accomplished two ends: it allowed criminal behavior to explode; and it allowed the elites to excuse themselves from any serious further attempts to manage the res publica. The people of the ghettos were free to do their thing; while the elites turned their full attention to Boomer careerism and Gordon Gecko style financial moneygrubbing.

As for the crusade to end the War in Vietnam, that was also an epic failure, never properly acknowledged. In fact, no one in the USA, no party or faction, ended the war. We simply lost the War in Vietnam. We just never said so, and still don’t. It ended in ignominy, with the last remnants of US officialdom in Saigon having to be rescued by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy. The so-called “gooks” in their black pajamas beat the giant American “grunt” army with its bottomless supply of attack helicopters and napalm. Chalk up another “L” for old school Liberalism.

You can’t overstate how demoralizing this was. And so. . . the serial reenactments of our forever wars of recent decades, mostly botches and failures despite our vaunted “defense” establishment, our glorious war technology, and our fake commitment to “spreading democracy.” We simply need to prove that we can’t possibly lose wars against more primitive people — though we have lost repeatedly, the fiasco in leaving Kabul in 2021 being even more ignominious than the flight from Saigon. This can only be understood, finally, as a species of national neurosis.

As was absolutely everything about the George Floyd riots of 2020, Wokery-in-action, with the torching of cities, the looting flash-mobs, and the tearing down of statues honoring American heroes. Try understanding that as the latest chapter in civil rights egalitarianism gone awry, starting with the sanctification of the druggie thug George Floyd, who so perfectly personified the failures of multiculturalism. (What were his values? Ever ask yourself that?)

Now, try (if you can) to understand what the election of Mr. Trump represents: the drive to restore a viable American common culture, to re-set our agreement on values, to repair the broken res publica. And note how wildly that is resented and opposed by this corrupt and degenerate residue of idealism gone to hell (literally), this ragtag and bobtail of Democratic Party elites, consumed in their mass formation psychosis, addicted to lying and violence, and furious that they are no longer in command.

So, now you know how all this works. An American common culture matters, and if we can’t put it together, we’re sunk. This is our chance to put it together.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Now You Know appeared first on LewRockwell.

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” —Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind

I’m at the wheel of my mother’s car with my elderly mother in the passenger seat. We are running errands and poking along on a six-laner through the vast sprawl of Jacksonville, Florida. The road is swarming with speeding traffic and afflicted on both sides with shopping malls, office parks, condominium developments, and warehouses.

Not long ago this land, like much of the Southeast, had been fields and farms and swamps. But the fields and farms and swamps had been filled in and paved over and built upon to capitalize on the swelling ranks of people of all ages moving here from all over the country as though at the end of a huge funnel. Around that time, the early 2000s, the Sunshine State’s population was growing at a rate about double the national average. My parents were just two among that multitude of transplants—in their case, retirees—many of whom surround us now.

“Where are we?” my mom asks apropos of nothing, while looking around at the maelstrom whizzing by in the glaring heat outside our air-conditioned car’s windows. I glance at her. Never a large woman, she appears smaller now on account of her years. And I swear she appears to be sinking into the oceanic, anonymous chaos all around us.

“What do you mean?” I ask. We’ve been on this road many times before. I say, “You know where we are.” I think, with a fright, that maybe she is losing her mind. Dementia, that’s what I’m thinking. Is this how it starts? Small slips of disorientation.

“Not like that,” she says. “I mean, what is this place?”

I feel her perplexity as my own. I feel “lost” here, too. Ungrounded. Uneasy. What is this place? We could be just about anywhere in the country; there are no defining features to indicate that we are anywhere unique. Where I live, in the Hudson Valley of New York, there’s the same scourge of urban and suburban sprawl. But the scale is smaller, more contained, and even easily avoidable if that’s something you want to do. There’s still plenty of nature around in which to seek solace. But not here. There’s no escape; you could drive for hours and still never find your way out of this same mind-numbing morass, drained of the natural world but for the ragged palmettos that occasionally dot the median strip that separates the opposing lanes of traffic.

Born in the Northeast, I spent most of my youth in an early American exurban pocket of Connecticut. Now, in the nearly 40 years that I’ve lived in the Hudson Valley, I’ve sown my own roots here among similar remnants of old architectures, storied histories, and bumpy, winding roads among which I was raised. I like it. I could even say I need it. And I’ve cherished living among the spirits of my ancestors on my mother’s side of the family who, as members of the Continental Army, fought the British in the Revolutionary War in these parts. My small house—a former gatehouse to a still-extant 19th-century Hudson Riverfront estate—is just a mile from a historic site and house that belonged to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He is entombed in the graveyard of the old stone church next door to me.

For most of their lives, my mother and father, too, lived in the Northeast. My guess is that in this moment my mother is not feeling rooted someplace or connected to anything meaningful in her life. I can almost feel as if we’re tumble weeds surrounded by more tumble weeds, all of us just blowing in the prevailing wind. With nothing around us now to remind her of where she’s from, of where her lineage fits into the nation’s history, perhaps it’s my mother’s ancestral memory that’s drawing a blank. Yet, she knows exactly where we are: Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

I despair for her. She has reached an age when you want to feel secure in, and at ease with, your place in the universe—a feeling of being held, if you will, by family and friends—yet now she appears to feel more emotionally orphaned than I’ve ever noticed before. It is strange to think of your mother or father being orphaned. But how else to put it? There is no one they can count on for regular, familial support; nothing beyond the physical comfort they’d sought all of their adult lives and have now achieved. But gained at the expense, it turns out, of no longer feeling at home anywhere. Which is to say there are other ways to feel orphaned besides having no parents. And there are other ways to suffer the blight of homelessness besides not having a roof over your head.

It has been a long road getting here. My father spent his working life seeking promotions in order to earn more money so that he could buy ever-larger houses to accommodate our growing family. Sometimes we picked up stakes and moved not just across town but to other towns and, once, to another state. And these moves, I think, disrupted the bonds of neighbors and friends we’d all had forged individually and as a family—my parents, my three brothers, and I—wherever we had settled. We didn’t move a lot but we moved just enough—and perhaps at critical times in my and my siblings’ psychological development—to fracture our developing internal cohesion and sense of having any sort of solid ground beneath our feet or allegiance to place.

The moving had taken a toll on our familial bonds as well. Since 1973, when my father relocated us from our beloved home in Connecticut to accept an executive job running a struggling brass factory in Michigan, I can recall only two times when my parents and their four sons gathered under one roof for a family celebration or holiday. Which is to say that we’ve never been a close-knit family, in part because of how we grew up and in part because of where we all ended up, which may be a consequence of how we grew up.

While I’m in New York, I have a brother in Colorado and another brother in Michigan. We also had a brother in Maine, but in December of 2022, he died at age 65. (I wrote about that here.) He never married and moved several times in search of satisfying work in graphic design and advertising, and for a place where he might feel rooted, which turned out to be the Maine coast. It was there that he spent his final years living in a roughly finished, walk-out basement of a house owned by a cousin of ours in Cape Elizabeth, yet still the most lost and alienated among four brothers.

***

Simone Weil was a French philosopher who, during WWII, had been commissioned by General de Gaulle, head of France’s government in exile in London—Free France—to write a report on the duties and privileges of the French after their liberation. This report was intended to outline options for reviving France after an allied victory, which was imminent but still a year away. This report was published in book form in 1949 in French under the title of L’Eracinement, six years of Weil’s death in 1943. It was published in English in 1952 as The Need for Roots: A Prelude to a Declaration of the Duties of Mankind. In it, she writes:

“A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”

What Weil is saying here is that it’s not enough to feel rooted to a particular place or to the community in which we’ve found ourselves. We also need to feel rooted to a shared history, to a common language, to a moral standard, to our work, to obligations, to some sort of spiritual life. She believed France was suffering from this lack of roots both before and during the war and wrote in The Need for Roots what she believed would help get France back on its feet.

I’m writing about this now because it appears to me that there are certain aspects regarding what happened in France before and during the Nazi occupation that are similar to what we have faced in this country before and during another kind of occupation—an insidious amalgamation of communism and chaos and corruption—which boiled over the bounds of common decency during the unfathomably fraudulent Biden regime, an occupation that sought—and to a great degree temporarily succeeded—in the decimation of so much our country that Weil also lamented had happened in France. Both countries suffered from a malady of uprootedness that weakened both individual and collective resilience and left them open for an invasion.

But, just as there are similarities, there are also differences between the Nazi occupation of France and the despotic occupation in America over the past several years. One is that it was usually obvious during the occupation of France who the adversaries were. For one thing, they’d come from another country and spoke another language. And they wore uniforms. During the occupation of this country, the conspirators were—and remain—not so obvious. The Luciferian operatives of the current occupation gathered their conscripts from tens of millions of ordinary Americans who had—and continue to have—no idea of the breadth and depth of the occupation of which they are a part. Nor do they have any inkling about its intention or how long it has been slowly infiltrating every nook and cranny of American life. As a result, this occupation has had on all of us a far more destructive ideological force than America has ever faced from a foreign invader.

What began, for example, in the 1990s in the stealth fog of “political correctness” in America, has mutated into our current monstrous “cancel culture” and gaslighting. “The tag itself, I have come to realize, creates a linguistic cul-de-sac where we just park our brains,” writes Diana West in her brilliant 2013 opus, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. “‘PC’ is, gosh, ‘PC.’ We look no further. Sure, the acronym, ‘PC’—’political correctness’—conveys the idea that something is phony, forced, and ideologically, not logically, inspired, but it doesn’t advertise its bona fide totalitarian provenance in the language of ideology, which, once accepted, once internalized, draws an individual into that ideological pact with the devil in which reasoning powers are lost. [Italics mine.] In other words, ‘PC’ is just another label for Big Lies—little lies, too. It describes the systematic suppression of fact that advances and sustains the ideology of the State and its barricades in academia, media, and other cultural outposts.”

Weil might have naively flirted with the Big Lies and little lies of the State totalitarian ideologies of her time, which then—as now—was embodied in communism. After all, it was de rigueur among the so-called intellectuals in France—the likes of leftists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—lingering over glasses of Burgundy in smokey Parisienne cafes in the 1930s and 1940s. But Weil eventually learned how foolish Karl Marx’s idea was about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” leading to a more egalitarian if not utopian civilization.

In The Need for Roots, she called Marxism “a completely outlandish doctrine.” Robert Coles in his 1987 portrait of Weil, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage, writes, “She knew how unlikely, how absurd such a notion was. She knew, morally, what ought to be, but she knew as a slave, as a brilliant slave, how oppressive force is on anyone’s life, and on society.” All anyone had to do to learn about the abject failures of Marxism was to dig a little and find out what was happening under Josef Stalin’s murderous hand in the U.S.S.R. not all that far as the crow flies from those glasses of Burgundy in those smokey cafes. But then, like now, there’s mysteriously little motivation among certain people—most people, I’m beginning to learn—to acknowledge the truth if it compromises or challenges their ideology.

Not so Simone Weil. Coles writes: “The Need for Roots, with its sketches of a postwar world, a France of her dreams, she not only used the metaphor of rootedness; she tried to spell out ‘the needs of the soul’ if an undermining, disheartening uprootedness were not to develop. Her recitation of those needs amounts to a remarkable conservative manifesto, a powerful statement on her part with respect to politics and social institutions.” He goes on to say that Weil “detested the proudly amoral or value-free partisans of the liberal and radical intelligentsia.”

In his preface to the first English translation of the book, published in 1952, T.S. Eliot writes that “she appears as a stern critic of both Right and Left; at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist.” He goes on to say that Weil was “by nature a solitary and an individualist, with a profound horror of what she called the collectivity—the monster created by modern totalitarianism. What she cared about was human souls.”

Here, so successful was the complicit mainstream media in getting vast swaths of the American population to go along with the big and little lies of the totalitarian ideology of the State in our times, which came to head with the COVID-19 psyop, that the complete conquest of America was at hand. And it was not happening through any sort of armed conflict, but rather via government orchestrated, insidious pathways into the mind through widespread censorship and narrative control, and all of it dominated by fear. Tens of millions of American minds had been captured and convinced that anyone—people like me and perhaps like you, too—who have done what we could to stand in the way of this tyrannical takeover, perhaps only by asserting our right to refuse the toxic COVID-19 jabs—had become, at the flick of a switch, the enemy.

And all it took was a complicit media to spin the lies big and little, a phenomenon of which Weil, too, was well aware. She writes in The Need for Roots:

“We all know that when journalism becomes indistinguishable from organized lying, it constitutes a crime. But we think it is a crime impossible to punish. What is there to stop the punishment of activities once they are recognized to be criminal ones? Where does this strange notion of nonpunishable crimes come from? It constitutes one of the most monstrous deformations of the judicial spirit.”

***

The Nazi occupation of France had begun in May 1940 when France was invaded by German forces. The occupation ended in Paris in August 1944. By the latter part of that year, all of France was free. So, Weil was writing during the occupation while she was living in London, itching to get back to France to fight with the French Resistance, but unable to do so because of her failing health—she struggled with poor health throughout her life and was tormented by migraines—which might have been exacerbated during her brief involvement in 1936 on the harsh battlefields of Spain while fighting with the Republican forces against Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War.

One time on the front along Spain’s Ebro River, Weil, nearsighted and clumsy by nature, accidentally stepped into a large vat of hot cooking oil. In her biography of Weil, Simone Pétrement writes in Simone Weil: A Life of her and her fellow soldiers:

“They were still bivouacked in the bushes, on the right bank of the Ebro. They had started a fire in order to cook their meal in a hole dug in the ground, so as to screen any flames that might have given their position away. A huge pot or frying pan had been place at ground level over this fire of covered coals. Simone did not see it and put her foot right into the boiling oil. Her foot was protected by her boot but the lower part of her left leg and the instep were seriously burned.”

There is no telling what Weil might have accomplished had she joined the Resistance in France instead of writing in London. She was given an office on her own but never intended to give up her intention to get back to France to take on more dangerous missions. What we do know is that whatever dedication and energy she might have poured into the Resistance movement in France, she gave to her writing in London. “She was boiling with ideas,” writes Pétrement. “The sheer amount of what she wrote in London in a few months is almost beyond belief. She must have written day and night, scarcely taking the time to sleep. More than once she spent the entire night in her office, where she voluntarily locked herself in.”

Read the Whole Article

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Gaza is suffering the most intense bombing, per capita, of anywhere on earth, ever.

Over 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, an area slightly smaller than the City of Detroit, Michigan, resulting in the recorded deaths of at least 60,000 Gazans and injuries to hundreds of thousands.¹

It is impossible to overstate the effects of the abominable bombing war on Gazans, their lives, their families, their health, and their communities.

What has escaped attention up until now is the undeniable environmental and health effects of the bombing of Gazans on Israelis, as well as on citizens of neighboring states, and the potential harm to U.S. military personnel in the region.

A study of explosion physics based on declassified Department of Defense data, as well as blast temperature data and consequent emissions; a review of wind patterns, together with publicly available data of health effects from 9/11, as well as data gathered from U.S. veterans of the Persian Gulf War, yield a shocking conclusion.

Israel, in executing the unprecedented bombing attack on Gaza, is, in effect, bombing itself, with grave consequences for the public health of its people.² What is being visited upon Gaza does not stay in Gaza.

The sustained bombing of Gaza pulverizes stone, heavy metals, and the human body. The vaporizing of human beings under extreme heat and pressure combines with dust, water vapor, and metallic particles the size of microns, all blasted upwards, aerosolized, wind-driven across borders, into Israel and surrounding countries.³

The unlimited bombing of Gaza has created an unparalleled ecological and biomedical feedback loop. Israel exhales death in Gaza and inhales the Gaza it has vaporized.

Israel, in bombing neighboring Gaza, is breathing in its own fallout, along with the vaporized remains of its declared enemies. The external consequences of violence becomes internalized. The substance of the oppressed communes with the oppressor.

On a clinical level, breathing in bioaerosols can compromise human immune systems.⁴ Breathing in ultrafine particles from non-biological war dust can cross the blood-brain barrier and contribute to neurodegenerative disease.⁵

Israel and the Palestinians share a common atmosphere. They inhale the same war dust, from bomb materials, carbon soot, and the fine particle remains of vaporized Gazans.

Human cremation occurs at temperatures between 1,400°F and 1,800°F.⁶ The blast temperatures of the bombs identified as being dropped on Gaza—MK-84 bombs: 4,496°F; GBU-39s: 4,892°F; BLU-109s: 3,632°F—far exceed this range.⁷ In comparison, blast furnaces used to melt steel operate at 2,500°F to 2,800°F.⁸

People at the epicenter of such bombings in Gaza are instantly turned into dust. This is a factor confounding the determination of exactly how many people have perished in Gaza since October 2023. How can an accurate body count be achieved if bodies have been turned to smoke and ash?

Let’s look at 9/11. The total confirmed dead: 2,753. Almost 40% of the victims were never identified, as their bodies were fragmented or vaporized, reduced to dust.⁹

When a bomb hits its target—for example, a tent city—the high-temperature explosion can vaporize a person so thoroughly that microscopic particles of DNA and loose molecules are suspended in air, mingling with dust and smoke as bioaerosols.¹⁰

These biologicals—DNA and fat in human tissue—turn to carbon, black dust, and smoke. The minerals of bones and teeth, skeletal dust, go airborne. Fragments of cells can float in the air, bubbles holding fat, bone, and broken DNA strands travel with the wind and are breathed in dozens of miles from the blast site.¹¹

It is not only the superheat that destroys the human body. The explosive force of a bomb, in terms of pounds per square inch (psi), can produce vaporization at the blast site, an impact equivalent to a plane plunging into the earth at high speed.¹²

As 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped in Gaza, the matter destroyed takes a different form, as toxic pollutants carried aloft in gas, dust, vapor, and particulates.

Specifically, toxic quantities of cadmium, nickel, lead, mercury, and arsenic are released into the air, together with dioxins, furans, PCBs, (polychlorinated biphenyls); PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and VOCs (volatile organic compounds).¹³

One calculation indicates that 100,000 tons of bombs, exploded in a densely populated area of Gaza, can generate between 800,000 to 1.2 million tons of pollution.¹⁴

Add to this the dust of Gazans’ human remains and you have extreme airborne consequences carried by the wind, directly into Israel, particularly the central and northern regions, and far beyond.

There are relevant comparisons for the health effects of a tremendous explosion in an urban area. A month after 9/11, people in Manhattan began to develop chronic coughs.

A longitudinal study of members of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) revealed that after six months, firemen began to suffer from chronic bronchitis; others saw the onset of pulmonary fibrosis.¹⁵

Two years after 9/11, a higher incidence of thyroid, prostate, breast, and other cancers arose among those exposed to 9/11 contaminants. Early-onset neurodegenerative, Alzheimer’s-type symptoms presented after five years or longer.¹⁶

Based on epidemiological data from studies of those near the people and buildings destroyed on 9/11, certain health effects can be anticipated in Israel.

The people of Sderot, Netivot, Be’er Sheva—all within a short distance of Gaza—are at high risk of long-term health effects of the bombing. Ashkelon and Tel Aviv have been exposed to environmental consequences, as has northern Israel and even Jordan.

While Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection operates air-monitoring stations at sites proximate to Gaza, it would be instructive, given the intensity of the bombing, to see if the effects of war-related pollution are being fully disclosed to the Israeli public.¹⁷

Given the unprecedented levels of bombing in Gaza, the types of bombs used, their explosive power, the extent of physical destruction, the extraordinary number of casualties, the creation of large plumes of black smoke containing the genetic material of burned and vaporized Gazans, the people of Israel—on the other side of the Gaza boundary—will likely experience increased levels of respiratory illness, asthma-like and other pulmonary diseases, and a sharp increase in cancer as a direct result of being exposed to toxic airborne substances present at a microscopic level.¹⁸

Added to this direct hazard is the ongoing recirculation of wind across the vast hellscape to which Gaza has been reduced. That, too, will sweep up and redistribute the contaminants from the over 50 million tons of debris from the land of Gaza to the land of Israel.

At this point, the calamity which has befallen Gaza as a result of incessant bombing will visit, in various forms and degrees of harm, southern and central Israel, western Jordan, the northeast Sinai Peninsula, northern Egypt (Delta and Cairo), Lebanon, Cyprus, southwestern Syria, northwestern Saudi Arabia, southeastern Turkey, Crete, Greece, Sicily, and Malta. Additionally, sea spray can carry aerosolized particles clear across the Mediterranean Sea.¹⁹

The United States has a substantial number of Naval forces in the eastern Mediterranean, including two aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS Gerald R. Ford, as well as numerous other assault ships.²⁰

U.S. military installations are present at Incirlik, Turkey, Naples, Italy, Cyprus, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. All face “war dust” pollution hazards as a result of the bombing of Gaza.²¹

I know well the adverse health consequences suffered by US servicemen and women who served in the Persian Gulf War, 1990–1991.

Veterans of that war came to my congressional office complaining of constant pain, neurological, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal and respiratory symptoms, all of which were ignored or covered up by the Department of Defense.

As a Member of Congress, over the objections of the Department of Defense, I took up the cause of veterans who suffered what came to be known as Gulf War Illness, a multi-symptom condition still affecting, to this very day, nearly 245,000 veterans of the Persian Gulf War.²²

Bernie Sanders and I worked together in Congress to obtain funding for research into GWI, which is now a medically recognized, war-related condition.²³

When you see the measurable, catastrophic effect which war environments can have on those who serve, and the measurable catastrophic effect of those proximate to the 9/11 attacks, and the indefensible obliteration bombing of Gaza and its people, you may come to an understanding of the wholly fallacious notion of the containment of war and why I assert Israel is bombing itself.

The bombing of Gaza has created a human health crisis which cannot be ignored any longer.

There must be an immediate cease-fire on humanitarian and ecological bases.

• The UN must urgently address the collapse of the Palestinian public health system, including the implications of the war for respiratory diseases and cancers among survivors.
• The UN must lead a Transboundary Environmental and Human Health Assessment of the Immediate and Long-Term Implications of War Dust, which will include transboundary assessments of the toxic environmental effects of the war.
• Monitoring stations must be set up. The people of the world have a right to know what is in the air they breathe.

International humanitarian and environmental law must, at last, be enforced.

UN representatives must determine a path forward.

Israel and the United States must consider the far-reaching consequences of the decision to attack and bomb the people of another country.

The tortured mindset which licenses the extinction of Gazans is now a spectre haunting the entire world, with its ghoulish designs on Iran. I will explore that approaching cataclysm in a future column.

Human rights and compassion are not considerations in bombing Gazans. Perhaps enlightened self-preservation can be introduced as a means to stop the bombing, once and for all.

The war against Gazans must end, and perhaps through the suffering of Gazans, and understanding the regional and global health impact of bombing, we may understand why it is time to call an end to all wars.

Footnotes:

1. UNOSAT Gaza Strip 7th Comprehensive Damage Assessment, May 31, 2024.

2. DDESB Blast Effects Computer, DoD, June 11, 2018.

3. Milgram, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963.

4. Oberdörster et al., Particle and Fibre Toxicology, 2005.

5. Calderón-Garcidueñas et al., Brain and Cognition, 2008.

6. CANA Position Statement, 2022.

7. Department of the Army, Military Explosives, TM 9-1300-214, 1990.

8. World Steel Association, LCA Eco-profile, 2023.

9. NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner, 2023.

10. Møller et al., Journal of Heredity, 2013.

11. Block & Calderón-Garcidueñas, Trends in Neurosciences, 2009.

12. DoDM 4145.26, DoD, March 13, 2008.

13. UNEP, From Conflict to Peacebuilding, 2009.

14. NATO RTO-TR-071, Urban Operations 2020, 2024.

15. FDNY WTC Health Program, 15-Year Report, 2007.

16. Mount Sinai WTC Health Registry, 2021.

17. Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection, Air Quality Reports, 2024.

18. WHO, Health Effects of PM, 2013.

19. EUMETSAT, Dust Transport Models, 2023.

20. USNI News, Carrier Deployments, June 2024.

21. Wikipedia, U.S. Overseas Military Bases, 2024.

22. VA Gulf War Research Reports, 2008–2024.

23. CDMRP Gulf War Illness Research Program, ongoing since 2006.

This originally appeared on The Kucinich Report.

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News this week that Elon Musk will soon be departing his “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is a grim reminder of what happens when you challenge big spending DC. Unfortunately, the lesson once again is that when you challenge the empire, the empire eventually strikes back.

President Trump rode into office with the help of Elon Musk’s ambitious plan to cut two trillion dollars in spending and slash useless and bloated government bureaucracies. Opinion polls demonstrated the huge popularity of the “Department.” Americans were excited when DOGE came to DC.

The exposure of the real harm being done to the country by agencies like USAID and others reinforced the idea that much of the “Federal bureaucracy” was simply not needed. Although Musk became a figure of hate for the entrenched special interests, to the large chunk of America forced to pay for Washington’s excesses he became a hero.

Many in Congress, seeing its popularity, actively embraced DOGE. Suddenly those who helped us rack up 37 trillion in debt were talking about making huge cuts and posing for photos with Musk.

Unfortunately, after the photos were taken and the hoopla had died down, Congress returned to doing what it usually does: nothing. There is no way for a DOGE to succeed without the Legislative Branch enshrining those cuts in legislation. But when the massive “Big Beautiful” spending bill was introduced, the spending cuts were nowhere to be found.

In the end it was the Beltway addiction to the global US military empire that may have hammered the final nail in DOGE’s coffin. The “Big Beautiful” spending bill actually increased military spending even after President Trump hinted that a 50 percent cut was possible. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bragged about presiding over the “first” trillion-dollar defense budget. Starting a war on Yemen – at over a billion dollars a month – and saber rattling over Iran are the most obvious evidence that the empire has struck back. And of course the DC hawks want to “confront” China.

This isn’t the first time a populist, popular movement to tame the Beltway beast was embraced then defeated by that same beast. The “Tea Party” movement was launched in December, 2007, with volunteers supporting my 2008 Presidential campaign holding a record-breaking 24 hour “money bomb” on the anniversary of the 1773 Boston Tea Party.

Americans sick of deficit spending, over-reaching government, and the costly and counterproductive US military empire overseas, joined together to demand change. The “money bomb” success got Washington’s attention – money is the lifeblood of the political class – and before too long politicians of all stripes declared themselves to be part of the “Tea Party.”

They loved the popularity of associating themselves with the “Tea Party.” But actually cutting government? Not so much.

The first thing these newly-minted “Tea Party” members rejected was our demand for an end to the unsustainable, bloated military budget and our aggressive foreign policy. Eventually they backed away from other spending restrictions and within a few years the “brand” was diluted and tossed away.

What is the lesson here? Is it all futile? Hardly. The popularity of DOGE shows that Americans still want a much smaller government. That is great news, and the country owes a debt of gratitude to Elon for reminding us of this. But until Americans elect Representatives who have the courage to follow through beyond photo-ops, we will sadly continue down the path toward bankruptcy and collapse.

The post The Empire Strikes Back appeared first on LewRockwell.

I have been following Catherine Austin Fitts off and on for many years once I became fully convinced, she was “the real deal.” Her extensive “insider” background status at the top echelon of one of Wall Street’s most prominent and politically connected investment banks, and her sub cabinet stint at HUD during the George H W Bush regime, demonstrated she was being groomed for a seat within elite power brokers. (She served as managing director and member of the board of directors of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration.)

Too many readers may not be aware of the seminal importance of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. to the power elite.

C. Wright Mills observed in his pioneering work, The Power Elite, that “During the Democratic era, one link between private corporate organizations and governmental institutions was the investment house of Dillon, Read.”

Here are four crucial examples.

Paul Nitze, served as United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. He is best known for being the principal author of NSC 68 and the co-founder of Team B. He helped shape Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.

James Forrestal, was president of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. who later became the first Secretary of Defense under Harry Truman. He was assassinated by his enemies.

C. Douglas Dillion became vice-president and director of the firm that bore his father’s name (Clarence Dillon). Dillon became an American diplomat and politician, who served as U.S. Ambassador to France (1953–1957) and as the 57th Secretary of the Treasury (1961–1965) in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later served as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, was president of the Harvard board of overseers, chairman of the Brookings Institution and vice-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Nicolas F. Brady, was a former chairman of the Board of Dillon Read & Co. Inc. (1970–1988). He became United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. and a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group.

But Catherine Austin Fitts soon found out “where the bodies were buried,” particularly the nexus of the global narcotics traffic, money laundering, and the deep state. Further deep probing led to investigations of the missing trillions of federal funds put an even bigger target upon her back.

DEEP State and Continuity of Government (COG)

The post Tucker Carlson – Catherine Fitts: Bankers vs. the West, Secret Underground Bases, and the Oncoming Extinction Event appeared first on LewRockwell.

“I run the country and the world,” brags Trump.

The post The Wannabe Global Dictator appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Middle East Eye

The post Israeli official accuses UK minister of ‘blood libel’ over Gaza aid worker killings appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

LeoHohmann.com

The post Trump billionaire tech ally Peter Thiel sells ‘smart’ AI ‘war fighting’ system to NATO while talking up U.S. trade war with China appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post No Income Tax? But There’s A Hitch… appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

If Trump was pushing for Ukraine to continue the war and reject a peace agreement, the globalist left would blast Trump and rush to make a deal with Putin.

Because Trump wants to negotiate a deal with Iran, suddenly , the Dems are on the side of striking Iran.

Trump should use a new strategy. Put forth every antithetical, disastrous idea and strategy the Dems push. They’ll rail and pound their pigeon chests, demand he does the polar opposite and he can say, “ Put the bill on my desk. I’m ready to sign it”. And laugh his ass off.

See here.

The post Russia warns that World War Three may be coming appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

NaturalNews.com

The post Former Biden-era disinfo czar urges Brussels to “stand firm” against criticism of censorship laws appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Kirsti Noem’s purse was stolen at a DC burger joint by an illegal alien this week. The purse contained her security badge, passport, keys, blank checks and $3000 cash.

The robber was masked and she had a full security detail. 

What’s wrong with this picture, aside from everything?

See here.

The post Oh, Look Who Just Got Busted for Stealing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s Purse appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Hi Lew,

Next time somebody tells me I’m crazy for naming Soros, his NGOs, CIA cutout Atlantic Counsel, John McStain,Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar, Kerry were major players in the 2014 Ukraine Coup That Obama, Biden, Nuland, Brennan, Killery, and the aforementioned advocated, funded, armed and provoked the Maidan ( aka Nazi) uprising, naming them the “ good guys”. That there are no Nazis in Ukraine- it’s Russian propaganda.. .

Nazis ‘r’ Us’

See here.

The post Obama and Soros—Nazis in Ukraine 2014—U.S. in 2017? appeared first on LewRockwell.