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Gail Appel wrote:

Not only are the Dimms psychotic, but colorblind. Literally.

See here.

The post The Media’s Latest Attack on Trump at the Pope’s Funeral Blows Up in Their Face appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Gail Appel.

Jerome’s Substack

The post Tulsi’s doing the job of Bondi and Patel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Il manoscritto fornisce un grimaldello al lettore, una chiave di lettura semplificata, del mondo finanziario e non che sembra essere andato "fuori controllo" negli ultimi quattro anni in particolare. Questa è una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa è la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso è accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/potere-istituzionale-il-racconto)

Potere e governance raramente mirano a servire il pubblico, ma a preservare il controllo. Un commento sul mio ultimo articolo, Il prezzo della convenienza, lo riassumeva perfettamente: “Il problema cambia completamente quando lo stato decide di volerti controllare invece di servirti”.

Ciò descrive uno schema che sta diventando sempre più chiaro: una società divisa non tra sinistra e destra, ma tra coloro che credono che le istituzioni governative abbiano buone intenzioni ma necessitino di riforme, e coloro che capiscono che consolidare il potere e il controllo è la loro natura intrinseca.

Il mio percorso personale verso questa comprensione è stato graduale. In decenni di esperienza nel settore tecnologico, ho visto come sistemi pensati per democratizzare l'informazione potessero trasformarsi in strumenti di sorveglianza e controllo.

Guardando indietro, è chiaro che stavamo costruendo l'infrastruttura per un monitoraggio e un controllo sociale senza precedenti, anche se ci ho messo un po' a rendermene conto. Come molti nel settore delle dot-com (come lo chiamavamo all'epoca), credevo che stessimo democratizzando l'informazione e connettendo l'umanità. Invece stavamo creando gli strumenti perfetti per la sorveglianza di massa e il controllo sociale.

I segnali di questo schema più ampio erano ovunque: guerre infinite scatenate sulla base di premesse false, la porta girevole tra aziende e stato, la costante erosione della privacy. Come molti, inizialmente li ho visti come bug piuttosto che come caratteristiche del sistema.

L'illusione del riformatore

Essere realistici sulla natura del potere non rende pessimisti. Capire come funzionano realmente i sistemi è il primo passo verso la costruzione di alternative migliori. Ma questa illusione è potente perché offre speranza: se solo riuscissimo a riformare il sistema, tutto funzionerebbe come previsto.

Questo modello di crescita istituzionale segue un ciclo prevedibile che sfrutta la psicologia umana: in primo luogo emerge un problema (reale o artificiale) che innesca una reazione pubblica, in genere paura o indignazione, infine le autorità implementano “soluzioni” pre-pianificate che espandono il loro controllo. Si consideri quanto segue:

• COVID: Problema (emerge il virus), Reazione (paura pubblica), Soluzione (ampliare i poteri statali, interventi medici obbligatori);

• Crisi finanziaria: problema (crollo del mercato), reazione (panico economico), soluzione (salvataggi e controllo ampliato del sistema bancario centrale);

• Terrorismo: problema (attacchi dell'11 settembre), reazione (paura e incertezza), soluzione (sorveglianza di massa e guerre senza fine).

Le misure temporanee di “emergenza” diventano permanenti, eppure cadiamo ripetutamente in questo schema perché offre la consolazione di un'azione apparente.

Questa visione del mondo sostiene che quando lo stato fallisce, ciò è a causa di corruzione, incompetenza o controlli insufficienti. La soluzione è sempre di più: più controllo, più regolamenti, più esperti “qualificati” (come ho approfondito in L'illusione degli esperti). È un programma di riforma perpetuo che non si chiede mai se l'istituzione stessa possa essere il problema.

Pensiamo adesso a come tutto ciò si traduce in pratica. La FDA non riesce a proteggerci dai farmaci pericolosi, quindi chiediamo maggiore autorità per la FDA. La SEC non riesce a prevenire le frodi finanziarie, quindi ne espandiamo i poteri normativi. Il Dipartimento dell'Agricoltura non riesce a proteggere i piccoli agricoltori, quindi gli diamo più potere sulla produzione alimentare. Ogni fallimento diventa una giustificazione per espandere le stesse istituzioni che hanno fallito.

Questa mentalità riformista, per quanto convincente, trascura una verità fondamentale sul potere stesso.

La consapevolezza del realista

Mentre i riformatori inseguono il miraggio di una migliore supervisione, i realisti comprendono ciò che Machiavelli aveva capito secoli fa: il potere cerca di preservarsi e di espandersi.

La Rivoluzione americana fu innescata da tirannie molto meno invasive di quelle che oggi accettiamo silenziosamente. Una tassa sul tè e qualche soldato nelle case private scatenarono una rivolta; oggi rinunciamo alle nostre comunicazioni private, ai dati di geolocalizzazione e all'autonomia medica senza quasi protestare.

Non si tratta di individui malintenzionati. Molte persone entrano al servizio dello stato con un sincero desiderio di aiutare le proprie comunità. Il problema è sistemico. Proprio come la FDA inevitabilmente serve le aziende farmaceutiche e la SEC protegge Wall Street, ogni ente di regolamentazione alla fine serve la struttura di potere che presumibilmente dovrebbe monitorare.

Osservate come si ripete questo schema. Lo stato crea una scarsità artificiale nell'assistenza sanitaria attraverso restrizioni di licenze e brevetti, poi si propone come soluzione ai costi elevati. Svaluta la moneta stampandola all'infinito, poi scarica l'inflazione sulle imprese private. Ogni crisi diventa un'opportunità di espansione, ogni fallimento una giustificazione per un maggiore controllo.

Un tempo promettenti per democratizzare l'informazione, le piattaforme tecnologiche sono invece diventate gli strumenti perfetti per il controllo centralizzato, come dimostra la loro collaborazione con le agenzie governative durante il COVID. Abbiamo assistito a un coordinamento senza precedenti tra agenzie governative e piattaforme tecnologiche per sopprimere opinioni mediche dissenzienti, persino da parte di esperti altamente qualificati. La censura si è estesa alle discussioni sulle origini dai laboratori, sull'efficacia delle mascherine e sui trattamenti alternativi – posizioni poi confermate dalle prove. Queste etichette di “disinformazione” sono state cancellate dalla memoria con il cambiamento della narrazione, ma il precedente per il controllo è rimasto.

Lo stesso schema si ripete in ogni ambito. Le valute digitali delle banche centrali vengono pubblicizzate come convenienti e sicure, ma rappresentano un potenziale senza precedenti per la sorveglianza e il controllo finanziario. Analogamente le politiche climatiche creano quadri normativi complessi che favoriscono le grandi aziende, ampliando al contempo la sorveglianza attraverso obblighi di tecnologia “smart”. Ogni cosiddetta “soluzione” rafforza il potere centralizzato, scaricando i costi su chi è meno in grado di sostenerli.

L'inversione di scopo

Ogni agenzia governativa mina sistematicamente la propria missione dichiarata, non per incompetenza, ma per disegno intenzionale. Il Dipartimento della Difesa – forse nel rebranding più riuscito della storia – rinominato dal suo nome originale, Dipartimento della Guerra, ci ha tenuti in un conflitto perpetuo, consumando il più grande bilancio militare della storia e fallendo il suo settimo audit consecutivo nel 2024. Il Dipartimento dell'Istruzione ha supervisionato un calo dei punteggi dei test e dei tassi di alfabetizzazione, con solo il 34% degli studenti di quarta elementare che leggono a livello scolastico. Il Dipartimento della Salute e dei Servizi Umani presiede una nazione in cui i tassi delle malattie croniche sono raddoppiati sin dal 1980.

Persino il Dipartimento del Tesoro, incaricato di mantenere la stabilità della nostra valuta, ha assistito a un calo del 96% del potere d'acquisto del dollaro sin dal 1913. L'Agenzia per la Protezione Ambientale (EPA) spesso protegge le aziende inquinanti, limitando al contempo le soluzioni a livello individuale e comunitario. La FDA funge da dipartimento marketing dell'industria farmaceutica piuttosto che da agenzia per la tutela dei consumatori, con il 45% del suo budget per la revisione dei farmaci proveniente dalle commissioni dell'industria farmaceutica.

Questa non è incompetenza; è una progettazione intenzionale. Ogni agenzia diventa un meccanismo per concentrare il potere proprio negli stessi settori che dovrebbe regolamentare.

Rivendicare la sovranità

L'Islanda medievale prosperò per 300 anni senza un governo centralizzato, dove le controversie venivano risolte attraverso un sofisticato sistema di tribunali e risarcimenti, anziché con sanzioni statali. La Lega Anseatica, una rete di città commerciali libere, dominò il commercio nordeuropeo per tre secoli attraverso accordi commerciali volontari e patti di mutua difesa, anziché attraverso il controllo statale, a dimostrazione del fatto che la cooperazione volontaria può creare una prosperità duratura.

Oggi stiamo assistendo all'emergere di versioni moderne. Le reti alimentari locali stanno aggirando l'agricoltura industriale controllata dalla burocrazia. I giornalisti indipendenti stanno aggirando i controlli dei media aziendali. Stanno emergendo economie parallele basate sullo scambio diretto e sulla fiducia della comunità piuttosto che sul controllo centralizzato. I soli mercati agricoli su piccola scala sono cresciuti da 1.755 a oltre 8.600 negli ultimi due decenni, migliorando la sicurezza alimentare, riducendo l'impatto ambientale e mantenendo la ricchezza all'interno delle comunità.

Queste non sono solo proteste contro il sistema attuale: sono progetti per un futuro più libero. Ogni cooperativa di homeschooling e ogni rete commerciale locale dimostrano come la prosperità umana avvenga in modo spontaneo quando le persone collaborano volontariamente.

La vera battaglia non è tra i nemici artificiali presentati dalle organizzazioni giornalistiche di parte, progettate per dividerci, ma tra coloro che ancora credono nella benevolenza del potere centralizzato e coloro che lo vedono per quello che è. Il primo gruppo continua a cercare di riformare un sistema il cui scopo primario è il controllo. Il secondo gruppo è impegnato a costruire alternative. La vera soluzione non sta nella riforma, ma nella creazione. Ogni iniziativa locale, ogni rete indipendente, ogni atto di cooperazione volontaria indebolisce la presa del controllo centralizzato. La questione non è se possiamo riparare istituzioni in rovina; è se costruiremo alternative migliori prima che la prossima crisi giustifichi un potere centralizzato ancora maggiore.

La buona notizia? Una volta che vedete il sistema per quello che è, non potete più non vederlo. Con ogni azione decentralizzata, ogni rete costruita e ogni comunità rafforzata, piantiamo i semi di un vero cambiamento. La sovranità non viene data, viene rivendicata.

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

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

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Hill

The post A damning indictment of Netanyahu’s leadership from his own security chief appeared first on LewRockwell.

The death of Pope Francis highlights a concern of many Catholics, including myself. Can we believe in the free market consistently with our faith? If we accept the Peronist views of the late pontiff, we obviously cannot do so. But fortunately, there is a better option available to us.

Clearly, God wants us to have peace and prosperity, to live in a “free and prosperous commonwealth,” as Ludwig von Mises put it. But the science of praxeology teaches us, by irrefutable logic, that only the free market enables us to avoid economic chaos. It therefore follows that the free market is ordained by God. This line of reasoning is more than theoretical. The great nineteenth-century free market economist Frédéric Bastiat, who was a Catholic, argued in just this way. As Claudio Resani notes: “’[L]iberty…is an act of faith in God and in His works.’ This is how Frédéric Bastiat thought concludes The Law, his most famous work. Reading his various writings and pamphlets, we can very often notice a recurring mention of God, or at least of a Creator, and of the morality that today we call ‘Judeo-Christian’ As already introduced, The Law is a very important work by Bastiat, and here we find the profound definition of freedom mentioned above but, we also find other statements with a religious background. Turning to the collectivist theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciples, horrified, Bastiat comments with a touch of irony: ‘But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves!’ Bastiat was a natural law scholar. For him, every individual is endowed by his Creator with rights and faculties that no one can justly take away from him. This is the same case with another famous statement he wrote in The Law: ‘Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life;…’ This is what is expressed in The Law by Bastiat as far as philosophy is concerned. It is a philosophical thought enlightened by a deep Christian faith that sees each individual as the image and likeness of the Lord. As far as economic thought is concerned, Bastiat expresses substantially the same natural law, to explain it we use his own words taken from Economic Harmonies and from the first edition of Economic Sophisms: ‘…the thought that put harmony into the movement of the heavenly bodies was also able to insert it into the internal mechanisms of society….freedom and public interest can be reconciled with justice and peace; that all these great principles follow infinite parallel paths without conflicting with each other for all eternity;… [This] we know of the goodness and wisdom of God as shown in the sublime harmony of physical creation…’ He is convinced that the harmony that exists in the natural sciences is also present in society and in interpersonal relationships, as a marvelous work of God. Again, in the introduction to Economic Harmonies, he writes about the harmony of individual interests: ‘It [the harmony of interests] is religious, for it assures us that it is not only the celestial but the social mechanism that reveals the wisdom of God and declares His glory.’ Economic Harmonies, although less famous than The Law, is by far his most important work. Here economics, philosophy, and theology merge and give life to the best and complete expression of Bastiat’s thought. In one of the last pages he writes: ‘To impair man’s liberty is not only to hurt and degrade him; it is to change his nature; it is (in the measure and proportion in which such oppression is exercised) to render him incapable of improvement; it is to despoil him of his resemblance to the Creator; it is to dim and deaden in his noble nature that vital spark that glowed there from the beginning.’ The fulcrum of Bastiat’s philosophical and economic thought is precisely the idea of spontaneous order, of natural harmony placed by God in human relationships because of the intelligence and free will with which the Creator has provided individuals.”

You might object that even if this argument is right, it goes against the official teachings of the Church, as expressed in papal documents. Certainly it goes against what the Peronista Pope taught, but his encyclicals are not infallible doctrine. As Father James Sadowsky, S.J., who was a friend of Murray Rothbard, pointed out, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891)  is the most authoritative papal encyclical written in the modern era on social justice, and it is favorable to the free market: “What I call the classical social doctrine is that which prevailed among Roman Catholic thinkers from the time of Rerum Novarum (1891) until the middle of the twentieth century.  Rerum Novarum is the title of what is called an ‘encyclical,’ a papal letter addressed to the bishops, which articulates a pope’s position on some matter of importance to the Catholic Church.  Though what is set forth in encyclicals possesses great authority, encyclicals do not, in and of themselves, possess the force of doctrine.  In other words, positions can and do change with the passage of time.  Yet more than any other single document, Rerum Novarum guided the thinking of Roman Catholics on socio-economic questions during the first half of our century. The encyclical was written in 1891. Leo XIII was striving to improve the living conditions of the worker, and quite properly so.  Here is Pope Leo’s summary of the problem that he thought needed his attention: ‘After the trade guilds had been destroyed in the last century, and no protection was substituted in their place, and when public institutions and legislation had cast off traditional religious teaching, it gradually came about that the present age handed over the workers, each alone and defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers and the unbridled greed of competitors . . . and in addition the whole process of production as well as trade in every kind of goods has been brought almost entirely under the power of a few, so that a very few exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses on non-owning workers.’ No socialist, no liberation theologian could have brought forth a stronger indictment.  But if one is expecting the pope to propose the socialist remedy as his own, one is heading for a severe disappointment: ‘To cure this evil, the Socialists, exciting the envy of the poor toward the rich, contend that it is necessary to do away with private possession of goods and in its place to make the goods of individuals common to all, and that the men who preside over a municipality or who direct the entire State should act as administrators of these goods.  They hold that, by such a transfer of private goods from private individuals to the community, they can cure the present evil through dividing wealth and benefits equally among the citizens. But their program is so unsuited for terminating the conflict that it actually injures the workers themselves.  Moreover, it is highly unjust, because it violates the rights of lawful owners, perverts the functions of the State, and throws governments into utter confusion. If the worker cannot use his wages to buy property, which under socialism he could not do, his right to dispose of his wage as he sees fit is taken from him.’ In other words, socialism dooms the worker to remaining forever under the very wage system it deplores, ‘. . . inasmuch as the Socialists seek to transfer the goods of private persons to the community at large, they make the lot of all wage earners worse, because in abolishing the freedom to dispose of wages they take away from them by this very act the hope and the opportunity of increasing their property and of securing advantages for themselves.’ Even more important, a regime of private property is demanded by human nature itself.  Unlike the animals, man must plan for the future.  He can do so only if he is able to possess the fruit of his labors in a permanent and stable fashion.  It is in the power of man, wrote Leo, ‘to choose the things which he considers best adapted to benefit him not only in the present but also in the future.  Whence it follows that dominion not only over the fruits of the earth but also over the earth itself ought to rest in man, since he sees that things necessary for the future are furnished him out of the produce of the earth.  The needs of every man are subject, as it were, to constant recurrences, so that, satisfied today, they make new demands tomorrow.  Therefore nature necessarily gave man something stable and perpetually lasting on which he can count for continuous support. But nothing can give continuous support of this kind save the earth with its great abundance.’ The ownership of the earth by man in general means only that God did not assign any particular part of the earth to any one person, but left the limits of private possessions to be fixed by the industry of man and the institutions of peoples.  To use the technical phrase, ownership in the original state was negatively rather than positively common: owned by no one but capable of being converted into property by anyone. How does one convert the unowned into property?  By laboring on what till that moment has been unowned.  By so doing ‘he appropriates that part of physical nature to himself which he has cultivated.’  He stamps his own image on the work of his hands in such wise that “no one in any way should be permitted to violate this right.”  Moreover, those who would deny to the individual the ownership of the soil he cultivates, while conceding to him the produce that results from that activity, forget that the modifications man introduces into the soil are inseparable from it.  A man cannot own one without owning the other.’ In sum, here is Leo’s indictment of socialism: ‘From all these conversations, it is perceived that the fundamental principle of Socialism which would make all possessions  public property is to be utterly rejected because it injures the very ones it seeks to help, contravenes the natural rights of individuals persons, and throw the functions of the State and public peace into confusion.  Let it be regarded, therefore, as established that in seeking help for the masses this principle before all is to be considered as basic, namely, that private ownership must be preserved inviolate.’ Running through the encyclical is the theme that man’s natural right of possessing and transmitting property by inheritance must remain intact and cannot be taken away by the State, ‘for man precedes the State,’ and, ‘the domestic household is antecedent as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community.’ At most, the State could modify the use of private property, but it could never rightly take away the basic right to its ownership and ordinary exercise.”

Let’s do everything we can to promote the free market. That is the best way Catholics can adhere to the teachings of our Church.

The post The Free Market and Catholic Social Teaching appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales.

Regardless of all the suffering men like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao caused, it is vitally important to understand that they were fellow humans, like any others, who absorbed a complex set of ideas that led them to act the way they did. Although we no longer see people as being possessed by evil spirits, or heretics to be tortured or burned at the stake, many people still see these men as non-humans, maniacal creations that just commit “irrational evil,” thus overlooking what really matters—the ideas they held. Therefore, we understandably keep repeating the same fallacies and their consequences. Let us briefly try to understand some of the actual fallacies which led to Hitler’s disastrous views and actions.

Let’s begin by briefly summarizing how the modern socioeconomic order has arisen during the last 300 years, and the vital role that increasing freedom and “economic competition” played. For this, I quote a previous article, “How Austrian Economists Repeatedly Saved Civilization”:

Until the late 1700s, most people lived in small, nearly self-sufficient farming towns. As technology improved (engines and factories) the rate at which mankind could transform raw materials into wealth was rapidly increasing in cities. A growing class of businessmen-entrepreneurs-capitalists were constantly innovating and due to people’s “freedom to trade” their private property only for things they deemed superior alternatives, entrepreneurs also had to copy the innovations of competitors thus inadvertently creating and spreading superior information, turning cities and eventually the entire planet into supercomputers that were constantly reordering mankind in increasingly productive and technologically advanced states.

Competition between increasingly wealthy and productive factories and entrepreneurs motivated them to pay increasing amounts of wealth for labor relative to what people could earn in farms causing people to move to cities, quickly leading to massively complex metropolises and steadily increasing living standards for everyone.

These changes—what we could refer to as the emergence or evolution of modern capitalism—were not the deliberate design of people, they were, as Carl Menger writes: “the unintended result of individual human efforts (pursuing individual interests) without a common will directed toward their establishment,” or, in the words of Adam Ferguson: “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

Since these changes were unintended, their benefits were not widely understood. Ignorance of how competing private sector companies were the creators and spreaders of superior information and subsequent social order led to some common errors. Erroneously and resentfully seeing the growing fortunes of some entrepreneurs and investors as exploitation of laborers—among numerous other fallacies led to the rapid spread of a new erroneous ideology-mythology—socialism.

Misguided ideologues and resentful masses increasingly thought that private companies led to unfair differences in wealth and exploitation, and that abolishing them or having them managed by a competition-immune coercive bureaucracy of experts, in other words, the state or government or the “public sector” would be better for society. Naive intellectuals would describe these increasingly popular fallacies-myths in a manner that was bound to go viral and that is what sort of happened with Karl Marx and his bite-sized “Communist Manifesto” where he famously writes: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

Hitler was one of those “misguided ideologues” who did not understand the vital role freedom and emerging private sector businesses and their competition played in both, generating and spreading superior information, as well as using profit-loss calculation to ensure they were ordering society in a manner where more wealth (sales revenue) was produced, than consumed (costs), thus being a profitable wealth-increasing order. This, of course, made Hitler a socialist, a National Socialist (Nazi). These economic fallacies he shared with other leading socialist-minded figures of his time like Mussolini, Stalin, and FDR.

The Soviet competition-immune bureaucracy owned and generated all the information that attempted to order production. The Nazis allowed private ownership in name, but, as Mises explains in his treatise Human Action,

…in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government’s supreme office of production management…. This is socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.

Thus, as with the Soviets, all information needed to coordinate and order production emerged and was coerced from a competition-immune bureaucracy, leading to—per Mises—Planned Chaos.

Hitler, being a man of his time—like other major racists like Churchill and Roosevelt—also fooled himself into believing that race or tiny biological differences within humans were a vital factor for socioeconomic prosperity. It was culture-software, the above-summarized emergence of capitalism and related social institutions like private property, money, finance-banking, the rule of law, etc., not “hardware” (blue eyes, white skin, etc.), which was the main factor in the rapid relative socioeconomic advancement Europeans had enjoyed paving the way for their misguided imperialism of the time. The cultural—not biological—evolutionary process which has created capitalism is much, much faster than the slow genetic biological evolution, thus rendering slight genetic differences between races and populations largely irrelevant. As Hayek writes:

…biological evolution would have been far too slow to alter or replace man’s innate responses in the course of the ten or twenty thousand years during which civilisation has developed… Thus it hardly seems possible that civilisation and culture are genetically determined and transmitted. They have to be learnt by all alike through tradition.

As numerous great free-market thinkers like Mises, Robert Higgs, and Ralph Raico have shown, during the last couple thousand years different groups of people, in widely dispersed locations like the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, traded the sort of title for most socioeconomically-advanced places. Mises makes this point and criticizes people who erroneously focus on race:

But it is by all means an unsatisfactory answer to say that a genius owes his greatness to his ancestry or to his race. The question is precisely why such a man differs from his brothers and from the other members of his race.

It is a little bit less faulty to attribute the great achievements of the white race to racial superiority. Yet this is no more than a vague hypothesis which is at variance with the fact that the early foundations of civilization were laid by peoples of other races. We cannot know whether or not at a later date other races will supplant Western civilization.

Hiter’s anti-Jewish fallacies significantly grew from misinterpreting inadvertent Jewish overrepresentation in the horrific Bolshevik revolution and resulting Soviet Communist calamity, with some deliberate malicious plot masterminded by Jews and/or tied to their “race.” Jewish author, Yuri Slezkine, writes in his excellent book The Jewish Century: “At the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917, at least 31 percent of Bolshevik delegates (and 37 percent of Unified Social Democrats) were Jews.” Jews—at least in Lenin’s Russia—were, on average, better educated, thus inadvertently rising to the top of the disastrous ideological bureaucracy, which required the better-educated to coerce the rest. Lenin mentions how:

Jewish intelligentsia members in the Russian cities was of great importance to the revolution…. It was only thanks to this pool of a rational and literate labor force that we succeeded in taking over the state apparatus.

Unfortunately, ethnic Jews were also over-represented in the tyrannical Soviet secret police. Slezkine again:

In 1923, at the time of the creation of the OGPU(the Cheka’s successor), Jews made up 15.5 percent of all “leading” officials and 50 percent of the top brass (4 out of 8 members of the Collegium’s Secretariat). “Socially alien” Jews were well represented among Cheka-OGPU prisoners, too, but Leonard Schapiro is probably justified in generalizing (especially about the territory of the former Pale) that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.

In just 13 years—from 1927-1940—the Soviet secret police destroyed 29,084 Christian Orthodox Churches, leaving less than 500, while killing an estimated 80,000-100,000 priests. This erroneously made it seem to naïve thinkers like Hitler—and sadly many to this day—that “the Jews” were purposely annihilating Christianity due to sheer malice instead of just being over-represented in a disastrous ideology.

Bottom line, per Mises, “We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.”

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

The post The Economic Fallacies Underpinning Hitler’s Disastrous Views appeared first on LewRockwell.

It was August 18, 2021. I was at a coffee shop in Paso Robles, California. I had kids in college who feared that their institutions might kick them out if they didn’t get one of the experimental mRNA-based Covid “vaccines.” They didn’t need the shots for many reasons, from their healthy age and lack of any co-morbidities to the most important fact of all: our entire family had gotten and fought through Covid and we all had antibodies, easily demonstrated by blood tests we offered to provide from their doctors to the schools. Worse, there were legitimate fears of myocarditis and pericarditis among young people from the Covid shots. I knew of a 19-year-old girl locally whose heart was so immediately damaged that she required a heart transplant. (Yes, seriously. I wrote about it at the time. I worked for four years in organ transplantation.)

In addition to seeking medical exemptions, my kids appealed to an even more important right as Catholic Christians, a sacred right: conscientious exemption. This form of moral-religious exemption is considered more powerful and constitutionally protected in America than medical appeals. In fact, one of my kids in the summer of 2021 was told just that by the school’s powers-that-be. Students would be better served by filing religious exemptions.

But then the news hit that August 18. I read on my phone that morning that the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, head of the world’s largest body of Christians, stated that Catholics not only should get the shot but had a moral duty to do so. He said that “getting vaccinated is an act of love” and “our choice to get vaccinated affects others.”

As happened with seemingly every Francis statement, a debate then erupted over whether Francis in these remarks—and others prior and yet to come—had said that Catholics were “morally obligated” to get vaccinated or had a “moral responsibility.” And was he speaking of a “moral obligation” to “healthcare” generally or the vax specifically?

Yes, you know the drill. How exhausting it always was. Maddening Francis statements like this would be made to the media and created some of the most outrageous moments of his papacy. Every time that Francis grabbed a mic on an airplane we braced ourselves for the tumult to come, not knowing which centuries-old Catholic teaching might suddenly come into question.

Indeed, in a January 10, 2021 interview on Italy’s TG5 news program, Francis had said: “I believe that morally everyone must take the vaccine. It is the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.” Between that remark in January and what he had just said in August, who could blame the liberals at NPR and elsewhere for headlines reporting that the pope said that Catholics had a “moral obligation” to get vaxxed?

As for Catholics who disagreed and pleaded for exemptions, Francis said: “I do not understand why some say that this could be a dangerous vaccine. If the doctors are presenting this to you as a thing that will go well and doesn’t have any special dangers, why not take it?” The pope insisted: “There is a suicidal denialism that I would not know how to explain, but today people must take the vaccine.”

They “must.”

Of course, many doctors disagreed with that. They wrote medical exemption claims for their patients. My good friend Tom (I wrote about his case just after the Francis statement) had such a physician’s statement because his Covid antibodies were sky high after nearly dying from the virus. His physician said the shot was not only unnecessary for him but could be dangerous. But most HR departments refused such claims, demanding a one-size-fits-all approach. And if Tom sought the added backing of a religious/conscience appeal as a Catholic, he would have no recourse there, especially given that the pope stressed the moral imperative that he get the shot.

For Francis, his words served as a universal checkmate against Catholics seeking exemptions, not to mention for the pope-splainers, who yet again tried to parse his words. There was no denying what Francis was saying at this point. We could re-translate his statements all we wanted. He had obliterated our religious appeals, plain and simple. Every pro-vax liberal Catholic in America, and every pro-vax priest, bishop, cardinal, hospital, university, health organization, charity, or whatever, had enough from Francis to inform any Catholic making a religious appeal that the pope himself was saying no way.

Get the shot! Do you not love your neighbor?

Francis’ Covid remarks were some of the worst and most shockingly ill-informed statements of a 12-year papacy of chaos and confusion that left many of us pope-splainers and defenders frustrated, angry, exhausted. I went through that painful process with my many writings on Covid, here at Crisis (here and here) and especially at The American Spectator, of which I’m the editor. (I wrote so often on the subject because of my medical background. I did work in immunology for the organ-transplant team at the University of Pittsburgh under Dr. Thomas Starzl, the man who pioneered the procedure. And I most certainly don’t oppose vaccination.) Here at Crisis, our editor Eric Sammons (among other writers) wrote about it frequently (here and here), including a piece that I urge readers to consult again, “Have You No Decency, Holy Father?” in which Eric reviewed the distasteful Francis comments on Cardinal Raymond Burke’s near-death from Covid.

Returning to the point: The pope said that we had a moral duty to get vaccinated. And with that, Mr. and Mrs. Catholic, your religious appeals were dead. Alas, take the shot and accept the moral and physical consequences, or lose your job, get kicked out of the military, get booted from your college. Francis labeled you a moral failure and threat to your fellow man. You were not loving your neighbor.

Of course, it is crucial to remember that Francis’ position flatly contradicted his own Vatican and groups like the National Catholic Bioethics Center. Unlike Francis, those groups had long carefully studied these moral concepts in great depth. They were staffed by individuals with advanced degrees in bioethics, philosophy, medicine, developed over the course of decades in conferences and peer-reviewed papers. In fact, I had crafted religious appeals for my children based on some of these. Here’s the July 2021 statement that I wrote for one of my kids, which was added to the medical appeal we submitted:

My religious appeal is a simple and straightforward conscientious objection. My choice to not be vaccinated against my will is a matter of conscience and free will. I am Roman Catholic, and my Church backs this. In December 2020, the Vatican released an official statement that affirms: “vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation.” That document says that vaccination “must be voluntary.” The Vatican says that forced vaccination is a violation of freedom of religion and conscience. This is officially affirmed by the American bishops. My Church firmly stands behind this. This is my sincerely held religious belief. It is an ethical-moral-religious objection.

That was what we sent into the college. But alas, boom, then came Francis’ statements. I told my kids: “The pope himself just pulled the plug on your religious exemption.”

Of course, he pulled the plug not only for my kids. Millions of Catholics worldwide were sunk with no recourse, no protection. Over subsequent months, I got numerous emails from Catholics who felt they had no hope. I heard horror stories from those who lost jobs. When they filed appeals based on their conscience and faith, they were dismissed by an HR bully who informed them that their own pope said they had a moral duty to get the shot. Their pope undermined them.

It must be underscored here that the pope’s top American enforcer in this campaign was Cardinal Blase Cupich. Immediately upon Francis’ August 17 statement, Cupich and his Chicago diocese—as well as the diocese of Philadelphia—sprang into action. This was captured in a sad headline by the National Catholic Register: “Chicago, Philly Archdioceses Tell Priests Not to Provide Religious Exemption from COVID Vaccines.” The article stated:

The archdioceses of both Philadelphia and Chicago have instructed their clerics not to assist parishioners seeking religious exemptions from receiving COVID-19 vaccines.

An Aug. 18 letter from Fr. Michael Hennelly, Vicar for Clergy for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, said that neither the archdiocese “nor its parishes are able to provide support, written or otherwise, for individuals seeking an exemption from the vaccine on religious grounds.”

“Parishioners surely can determine their own actions, but it would be important to clarify that they cannot use the teaching of the church to justify such decisions, which in their essence, are a rejection of the church’s authentic moral teaching regarding  Covid vaccines,” the cardinal wrote.

“There is no basis in Catholic moral teaching for rejecting vaccine mandates on religious grounds,” he said. 

Cardinal Cupich wrote that “In fact, the Holy See has clearly stated that receiving the Covid vaccine is unquestionably in keeping with Catholic faith, and even has urged people to be vaccinated as an act of charity and out of respect for the common good in fighting the pandemic. Our moral teaching, while ever respectful of the rights of individuals, always keeps in focus the common good. Not doing so distorts Catholic doctrine.” 

Cupich went further. He pressured the bishops and National Catholic Bioethics Center to go against their informed understanding of the Church teaching on conscience. He went to battle against a July 2 NCBC statement that no Catholic should have opposed. That NCBC statement noted that it “does not endorse mandated COVID-19 immunization,” citing the December 2020 statement from the pope’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stating that “practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.”

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I am looking at a couple of random lines lifted from a bleak little poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., written at a sad time near the end of a short and, by his own reckoning, unfulfilled life. He was quite mistaken about that, by the way. His last words, whispered aloud about how happy he was to be going home to God, certainly put that misconception to rest.

Nevertheless, the lines he wrote were, without a doubt, an expression of bitter lamentation, advising us that because “The times are nightfall,” we must remain ever vigilant, on high alert in order to watch and see how “their light grows less.” Indeed, says Hopkins, on all sides we are beset by forces that threaten to put the lights out altogether, leaving the world impacted by the sheer dark. “The times are winter,” he tells us; thus, he summons us to see what he sees, which is “a world undone: They waste, they wither worse…”

Perhaps this is what Sir Edward Grey, England’s foreign secretary, had in mind when, on the eve of the Great War, he dolefully announced, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Less than a year later, all the lamps having gone out, Winston Churchill would declare in a letter to his wife that, “a wave of madness has swept the mind of Christendom.”

A mere half-century later, Walker Percy would make the same point in a piece of brilliant dystopian fiction called Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. Percy’s protagonist will spend sleepless nights rereading “Stedmann’s History of World War I,” a meticulous account confirming those same devastations referenced by Churchill:

For weeks now I’ve been on the Battle of Verdun, which killed half a million men, lasted a year, and left the battle lines unchanged. Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion. “The men in the trenches did not hate each other,” wrote Stedmann. “As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession.”

Shakespeare, of course, had foreseen much the same state of derangement some two or more centuries before when, in the voice of Hamlet on seeing the ghost of his murdered father, the king—a murder so “foul and most unnatural” that it must be avenged—cries out in the midst of a time as depraved and disjointed as any heretofore recorded: “O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right.”

But, alas, Hamlet proves singularly inept in doing so, leaving a stage littered with dead bodies, his own included. Still, the point is made, which is that we live in a deeply disordered age, one that seems on every side to conspire in keeping goodness at bay. Not just goodness but simple sanity, which is nothing more than seeing the truth of things, so that we don’t all go mad.

Would it be possible, I wonder, living in a world such as the one we’ve got, to sort of nudge things modestly along in a direction that will make it easier for people to be good? To remain sane? In other words, to be able actually to see reality straight on, and to act accordingly? Or must the lights always be going out, if for no other reason than the fact that humankind having had its Fall, no rebirth or reform will ever be permanent? Must the worm be forever inside the apple, insinuating its poison deep down, infecting the fruit from within?

What are we to say about all this? More to the point, what can we do? I mean, as Christians, that is, specifically Roman Catholic Christians? Are there measures we can take that might make a life of virtue possible, not just for the heroic few but for the mediocre many? Those who, as some wag once put it, are always at their best? Could not society bestir itself a bit on behalf of making the mediocre just a wee bit better? Not mere “fragments,” mind you, “shored against my ruins,” as Eliot famously put it at the end of The Waste Land, his chronicle of personal disillusion, which may or may not have expressed the disillusion of an entire generation. But something sane and solid for all of us; a scaffolding, as it were, on which the generality of human beings can lean in order to live a more decent, even saintly, life?

This is not about individual excellence, the triumph of the solitary soul, but about an effort to elevate everyone, or at least to make it easier for the generality of humankind genuinely to see goodness as a distinct possibility, even if they refuse to seize upon it in the daily round of their lives. Because, while no man may actualize himself without himself, without others he cannot actualize himself at all.

My body will, to a certain extent, always be a boundary separating me from others, but it can also become a bridge joining me to those others, a medium of communion no less. If to be is necessarily to be in relation, then all life is relational, lived out in a spirit, an ethos, of reciprocity with others. Even Robinson Crusoe, in order to find and fulfill himself, required the friendship of Friday.

Might it be possible, therefore, to build a culture where it is easier for men to be virtuous? “A cell of good living,” is how the craftsman and critic Eric Gill put it, “in the chaos of our world.” Not the beehive, but the Mystical Body.

And what exactly is culture but an embodied religion, a faith that is given flesh and blood and bone in a visible and public way, so that everyone may avail themselves of its customs and convictions. Have we got anything at all like that? I mean at the moment, right this minute? No, we do not. And were such a thing to suddenly materialize, a genuine social life rooted in religion, anchored to God, it would very shortly be suppressed; it would quite hastily be dismantled on the grounds that, having breached the sacred wall of separation between Church and State, it was nothing less than an affront to the U.S. Constitution.

Is there an answer to this? Can an argument be made to disabuse people of the high anxiety they experience whenever religion and politics, faith and culture, are thrown into the same mix, a conjunction perceived by many to be so toxic that we are forbidden to stir it into life? I think that there is. And to that end I’ve put together a number of essays which actually aim to persuade the reader that to join the two makes perfect sense—and that by not doing so we really are in the soup.

This originally appeared on Crisis Magazine.

The post Is Christian Culture Possible? appeared first on LewRockwell.

This is the first of a three-part series on the history of NATO and US European Command military exercises with Ukraine. This shows how the West, acting like a camel, slipped its big nose under the Ukrainian tent as part of a long-term strategy to defeat Russia. While many of these exercises were touted as peacekeeping in nature, the real purpose was to train and equip Ukraine with the ultimate goal of fighting and defeating Russia. In July 1998, for example, NATO’s Sea Breeze maritime exercise included anti-submarine warfare. WTF??? That ain’t peacekeeping. That is preparation to fight Russia in the Black Sea.

The process of making Ukraine a de facto member of NATO started in 1992, one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 1994 marked the first year that Ukrainian forces participated in NATO exercises, although these were held in Poland and the Netherlands. The following year, 1995, witnessed the creation of Ukraine’s Yavoriv military base as the NATO training center, although this was not formalized until 1999.

1999 was no coincidence… it was the year that NATO expanded to the East by accepting the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as new members on March 12, 1999. This provoked alarm in Russia because it obliterated the promise of former US Secretary of State James Baker, that NATO would not move one inch to the East. President Bill Clinton broke that promise.

Part 2 will cover the period, 2000 – 2010. Part 3 will cover 2011 – 2021. The plan to use Ukraine as a proxy to weaken Russia was born in the 1990s and matured into war in 2022. I hope you find this informative.

I did a podcast today with Garland Nixon. That is posted at the end of this article.

1992

NATO-Ukraine Relations in 1992 — In 1992, Ukraine formally established relations with NATO by joining the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) in March 1992. The North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) was established by NATO in December 1991 as a forum for dialogue and cooperation between NATO member states and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War.

The NACC ostensibly was created to foster political consultation and build confidence between former adversaries, reflecting NATO’s “hand of friendship” to the newly independent and transitioning states of Central and Eastern Europe, which also included Russia. The NACC’s activities paved the way for deeper cooperation, notably leading to the launch of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program in 1994, which allowed for more practical and individualized cooperation between NATO and partner countries.

In 1997, the NACC was succeeded by the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), which expanded the partnership framework to include more countries and provided a more sophisticated forum for dialogue and cooperation, reflecting the evolving security environment and the deepening relationships between NATO and its partners. Russia also joined EAPC, but was suspended from the organization in 2014 after the people of Crimea voted to reunite with Russia.

• Ukraine’s cooperation with NATO began in March 1992 when it joined the newly established NACC, marking the start of formal relations and opening the door for future military cooperation .
• The first concrete participation of Ukraine in a NATO-linked military exercise did not occur until September 1994, when Ukraine joined the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and participated in joint training exercises such as “Cooperation Bridge” in Poland .

1993

In 1993, Ukraine began its military cooperation with the United States and NATO, although it had not yet joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace (which happened in 1994). The most significant development in 1993 was the initiation of the U.S.-Ukraine State Partnership Program (SPP), established between the California National Guard and Ukraine. This program laid the groundwork for ongoing joint training, military exchanges, and exercises.

The U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) advocated for establishing a Military Liaison Team (MLT) in Kyiv as early as 1993, but the deployment was delayed due to diplomatic considerations. Nonetheless, military cooperation and engagement activities were ongoing under the Defense Attaché Office. The cooperation in 1993 set the stage for more formal and larger-scale military exercises such as “Peace Shield” and “Sea Breeze,” which began after Ukraine joined the Partnership for Peace in 1994.

1994

Cooperative Bridge 94

• In September 1994, Ukraine participated in its first NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) joint training exercise,
  “Cooperative Bridge 94,” held at the Biedrusko military training area near Poznan, Poland, from 12 to 16 September 1994 .
• This exercise involved approximately 600 soldiers from 13 NATO and Partner nations, including Ukraine, and focused on basic unit and individual peacekeeping tasks and skills.
• The aim was to share peacekeeping experience, develop a common understanding of operational procedures, and improve interoperability among NATO and Partner military forces .
• The exercise was conducted under the supervision of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and was jointly planned with Polish military authorities.

Spirit of Partnership

Later in 1994, a Ukrainian air-mobile unit participated in another PfP training exercise called “Spirit of Partnership,” held in the Netherlands.

1995

Peace Shield 1995:

The primary NATO/USEUCOM military exercise conducted with Ukraine in 1995 was “Peace Shield,” a joint US-Ukrainian exercise held at the Yavoriv training area near Lviv from May 23 to May 27, 1995. This exercise was part of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, which aimed to increase interoperability and cooperation between NATO and partner countries, including Ukraine.

Autumn Allies 95:
Another notable exercise was “Autumn Allies 95,” which involved approximately 400 U.S. Marines and 200 Ukrainian soldiers. The exercise focused on promoting interoperability in peacekeeping operations and was conducted later in 1995.

The Partnership for Peace program was central to these activities, providing a framework for joint exercises, training, and defense planning between Ukraine, NATO, and USEUCOM.

1996

Cossack Step-96:

In 1996, Ukraine hosted a military exercise called “Cossack Step-96” in cooperation with Great Britain. This exercise was conducted “in the spirit of Partnership for Peace (PfP),” NATO’s program for building trust and
interoperability with non-member countries, including Ukraine at the time. The exercise involved approximately 140 participants from Ukraine and Great Britain.

During this period, Ukraine was actively increasing its military cooperation with NATO through the PfP framework, which included joint training and exercises aimed at enhancing Ukraine’s ability to participate in multinational operations with NATO forces. The U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) was involved in
developing security cooperation with Ukraine, focusing on familiarization activities, military professionalism, and closer ties to NATO.

1997

Cooperative Neighbor-97:

In July 1997, Ukraine hosted the Cooperative Neighbor-97 joint exercise at the Yavoriv training grounds in western Ukraine. The exercise involved approximately 1,200 soldiers from the United States, Greece, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Macedonia. Cooperative Neighbor-97 was conducted under NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, which aimed to build
trust and interoperability between NATO members and partner countries. The exercise focused on joint training and cooperation, and was observed by U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen and Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk.

Sea Breeze 1997:

Sea Breeze 1997 was a multinational maritime exercise cohosted by the United States and Ukraine in the Black Sea region. The exercise included U.S. Marines and Ukrainian forces and was initially planned to simulate an intervention in a fictional ethnic conflict, but the scenario was changed due to Russian
sensitivities. The revised scenario focused on providing humanitarian aid after an earthquake. The land-based segments were moved from Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland to avoid local protests and Russian
opposition. While conducted “in the spirit of NATO’s Partnership for Peace,” NATO itself maintained a hands-off approach, with only Turkey among NATO members sending ships to participate directly.

Significance:

Both exercises were part of the broader NATO-Ukraine cooperation established by the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership, signed in July 1997, which set the framework for ongoing military and political collaboration. These exercises marked early steps in Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic security structures and were designed to enhance interoperability, readiness, and mutual understanding between Ukraine, NATO, and U.S. European Command forces.

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There is a sentence that has long bothered me.  It is treated as a piece of universal wisdom that humans gain with experience, and surely every member of a modern, industrial society has heard it in some form.  Whether spoken by a close friend or complete stranger, its utterance usually comes with a sly grin that invites the listener to reconsider a fundamental belief.  Here it is: That’s not how the real world works.

That dirty, little sentence slithers into conversations meant to turn a person’s perception of reality upside down.  We hear it when we question why people who commit the same criminal offenses are often punished differently.  We hear it when we question why less qualified people are admitted to schools or offered jobs to other applicants’ detriment.  We hear it when we question why certain businesses always seem to get government contracts, even when they routinely overcharge and underperform.  We learn that laws, merit, moral character, and hard work exist alongside nepotism, prejudice, favoritism, corruption, and other invisible factors that magnify or hinder individual opportunity.

What’s particularly strange about this lesson is that most of us do not learn it firsthand until we have neared the end of our teenaged years.  For those who have been fortunate enough to grow up in good families with loving parents committed to moral principles, it can be jarring to step into the “real world” to discover a society awash with malign influences and untruths.

An eighteen-year-old who joins the military is inclined to believe that the government would never recklessly endanger servicemembers’ lives; military life, however, quickly teaches that reckless endangerment is a large part of the job.  A twenty-two-year-old who joins a company is inclined to believe that the best employees will earn promotions; work life, however, quickly teaches that professional advancement is not always fair.  A young person who has never held a job is inclined to believe that taxpayers should “pay their fair share”; a new hire who sees a third or more of his paycheck deducted for a litany of government programs has a much different perspective.

It takes most of us two decades to grasp that a great deal of what we have been told about life is different in the “real world.”  That’s an awful waste of adolescence, isn’t it?  Can you imagine an ancient tribe teaching its youngest members the wrong ways to track and hunt prey only to reveal much-needed survival skills after two decades of life?  Of course not.  Only in modern, industrial societies does it somehow make sense to disguise the “real world” from the youngest generation until its members stumble into adulthood.  Then we shake our heads in dismay and wonder why so many young adults are stumbling.

However, there is something far more nefarious about these abrupt “real world” lessons: they reveal that much of society is based on deception.  In the West, young people are taught that their societies embrace free markets, free speech, and democratic forms of government.  In the “real world,” central banks distort currency values and manipulate markets, while regulatory burdens make it difficult for regular people to own and operate independent businesses.  In the “real world,” governments censor speech that challenges official policy, and prominent public figures, such as Hillary Clinton, openly call for the imprisonment of citizens who express unapproved points of view.  In the “real world,” unelected bureaucrats and espionage agencies manage most domestic and foreign policies with scant interest in the opinions of the national populations they purportedly represent.  Young Westerners are taught that bigger and more oppressive forms of government will make them “free.”  Only later in life do some discover that State-controlled economies and institutional policing of speech achieve the exact opposite.

What would be so bad about teaching children how the real world works?  Shouldn’t they be told from an early age that governments are the greatest threats to their lives and liberties?

After all, government agents decide what they can and cannot do, what kinds of property they may and may not possess, and how much of their future earnings they must hand over to the State.  Government agents decide whether they are “extremists” who should be kept under surveillance, whether their private communications will be intercepted, and whether their doors will be kicked down in the middle of the night.  Government agents decide which religious practices, civil rights, and forms of speech will be safeguarded and which will be criminalized.  Government agents decide which groups of people will be protected and which groups will be prosecuted.  Government agents decide when borders will be kept secure.  Government agents decide when to mandate experimental pharmaceutical injections.  Government agents decide what levels of toxicity in food and water supplies are acceptable.  Government agents decide when to send the youngest generations off to fight in foreign wars.

To prepare children for the “real world,” we should teach them that governments are not cuddly stuffed animals that hand out free hugs; they are the monsters in the dark that unleash real-life nightmares.

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Many of the problems we currently see in medicine are not new, but rather iterations of things that have been forgotten and occurred countless times in the past. For example, the COVID mRNA vaccines are not the first time the medical field has experienced irrational exuberance for a dubious remedy, even as some of their colleagues spoke out against it (at great risk to their professional standing). Here, we’ll look at what happened with corticosteroids, both because it provides a critical window into much of what’s gone awry with medicine and because steroids are some of the most problematic but widely used medications on the market.

Allopathy

Because of the work that has been done to enshrine our system of medicine as the gold standard everything else must measure up to, many are not aware it is just one of many approaches to healing that has been developed throughout history, or even that in previous eras, it had its own label rather than just being “medicine.”

Note: one of the major challenges I run into when writing is that there is no widely accepted term for our system of medicine, as they either simply assert it is “the standard” (e.g., conventional medicine or modern medicine) or frame it in a cultural context (e.g., “Western Medicine”). Of the accepted options, “biomedicine” is probably the most accurate (but largely unknown to the general public), whereas “standard medicine” (a term I made up) has become my favorite as it encapsulates it being the orthodox approach, the need of medicine to treat patients through standardized algorithms that ignore their individuality, and highlights J.D. Rockefeller’s monopolization of medicine in the early 1900s (as he named his oil monopoly “Standard Oil”).

Almost two thousand years ago, Galen, a Greek physician in Rome, collated, systematized, and refined existing approaches to medicine, particularly those originating in Greece, and then disseminated them worldwide. Central to Galen’s approach were the importance of anatomy (gained through continuous dissections) and the humoral theory of disease, which dominated Western medicine until around the 1850s.

For context, Hippocrates’ humoral theory of disease posited that health depended on the balance of four bodily fluids, known as humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humor was associated with specific qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry), elements (air, water, fire, earth), and temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic). Within this framework, disease resulted from an imbalance of these humors, caused by factors such as diet, environment, or lifestyle. Treatments, including bloodletting, purging, and dietary changes, aimed to restore humoral balance.

While this framework somewhat resembled what other cultures had come up with (e.g., the “fire” of the five elements in Chinese Medicine and “Pitta” of Ayurveda largely matched “yellow bile”), like surgery, it was more unique in its tendency to use forceful measures to correct a perceived humoral imbalance in the body. This in turn, gave way to a system of medicine where drugs that created dramatic physiologic changes (e.g., mercury, lead, arsenic, and opium) became the therapeutic mainstays of Western medicine, particularly since it was much easier to tell a drug “worked” if it created a dramatic effect.

Unfortunately, in many cases, those dramatic effects (e.g., it rapidly inducing vomiting) were due to the drug being highly toxic so many were injured by these early drugs, which in turn required the medical profession to aggressively double-down on the importance of their approach (particularly since so many people were being severely poisoned by mercury based drugs).
Note: during my training, another doctor proudly showed me the bag his father had brought to many visits, and sure enough, it had mercury in it (which remarkably the doctor did not even realize was mercury).

Because of the poor outcomes this form of medicine often produced, a variety of alternative approaches came into existence (e.g., Homeopathy in 1796, Eclectic Medicine in 1827, Osteopathy in 1874, Chiropractic in 1895 and Naturopathy in 1901), all of which were based on supporting the body’s ability to heal itself rather than trying to force the body into its desired state. To cement this distinction, the founder of Homeopathy used the term “Allopathy,” (“allo” means ‘other’ or ‘different’) as it highlighted allopathic medicine’s tendency to use external interventions (e.g., drugs or surgery) that created effects opposite to the existing disease in order to bring the body towards its desire state.
Note: initially, Allopathy was a derisive term, but in time some MDs adopted it to distinguish themselves from their competition, however once Allopathy used a variety of monopolistic tactics around 1910 to take over the medical marketplace (which was necessary to save the dying profession), Allopathy faded into obscurity and Allopaths simply referred to themselves as “doctors” while Allopathic medicine became “medicine” (and all the other approaches to healing largely faded into obscurity despite many offering immense benefit to patients).

As Allopathic medicine evolved (e.g., new drugs were discovered) it gravitated towards drugs which suppressed the unpleasant symptoms in the body (e.g., fevers or skin eruptions), in part because this matched its pre-existing mentality of forcefully overriding illness and in part because this was the easiest way to create a dramatic change in a patient (hence inspiring confidence in both the doctor and patient).

At the same time however, the competing schools of medicine became more and more aware of the damage Allopathic remedies created and gradually concluded that while suppressing symptoms could lead to short term improvements, it often also lead to the subsequent creation of severe illnesses (which coincides with Allopathic medicine being excellent at treating acute emergencies but poorly equipped to treat chronic diseases).

A key insight during this debate (Hering’s Law of Cure) came from a Homeopath who concluded that healing occurs in a specific order (e.g., from the inside out, from the head down, and in the reverse order of symptom appearance) and that disease occurs in the opposite direction (e.g., initially at a superficial level and then eventually at a deep one). Thus, by allopathically suppressing symptoms (which were often the body’s attempt to expel a pathogenic factor), rather than curing the illness, the pathogenic factor was instead pushed deeper into the body, creating a more severe illness in the future.

Note: Chinese medicine holds a similar perspective and argues that the defensive energy of the body which reacts to illness (the “Wei Qi)” functions to prevent external pathogenic factors from penetrating into the body. Chinese medicine in turn maps a progression of increasing severity of disease as the pathogenic factor travels from the superficial to the deep energy channels of the body (something I believe correlates with increasing blood stasis and loss of zeta potential obstructing larger and larger vessels). As such, Chinese Medicine’s treatments are often aimed at expelling a pathogenic factor rather than counteracting the symptomatic reaction to it. Conversely, some schools of Chinese medicine advocated for suppressing the initial reaction to the more dangerous plagues (as this was lifesaving at the time), but acknowledged this resulted in a chronic infection in the future.

Throughout my career, I have seen numerous extremely compelling cases of Hering’s Law of Cure (e.g., children with significant reactions to vaccines being given Tylenol for their fevers and then experiencing a much more severe illness, such as autistic regression, or COVID-19 patients crashing after their unpleasant fever is suppressed). Unfortunately, this principle remains largely unrecognized, and as a result, many standard medical practices are simply aggressive suppression of symptoms.

Note: Hering’s Law of Cure subsequently expanded to recognize that the “deeper” layer of physical symptoms were emotional and mental in nature, and then even deeper ones were spiritual symptoms

The Global Loss of Vitality

Early on, when I began reading about the largely forgotten history of medicine, I was struck by two things:

• How profoundly damaging many of the early Allopathic remedies were (e.g., I’ve previously written about the smallpox vaccines, and this book does an excellent job at shedding light on the damage mercury did over the centuries).

• How much healthier people (who weren’t poisoned by a mercury prescribing doctor) were and how much more effective many natural therapies were in the past than they are now.

This second point prompted me to begin asking older doctors (from various medical schools) if they had observed a general decline in human vitality in the patients they saw at the start of their careers compared to the end, and all of them shared that they had. Additionally:

• They noted that beyond patients becoming much sicker and having conditions they’d never seen before, it was also much harder to treat them as each therapy they used had shifted from making a dramatic improvement to a more minuscule one, which required numerous successive treatments to bring about an improvement.

• They typically attributed this shift to a loss in human vitality. They cited a variety of correlates (e.g., the average human body temperature dropping, people becoming less able to mount fevers, infants being less able to produce a brisk cry, or increasing degrees of fluid stagnation in their patients).

• They stated some of the treatments that had been developed by their profession were specifically made to address this loss of vitality, as their original treatments no longer worked. Conversely, some shared that when patients were placed in environments that restored aspects of their vitality (e.g., by being somewhere with exceptionally clean air), much less needed to be done to improve their condition.

•One doctor I spoke to had asked this same question of their mentor, while another had asked a mentor who’d also asked their mentor—all of whom corroborated that this decline in vitality had been continually in motion since at least the late 1800s.

Note: typically this decline in vitality proceeds in a linear fashion and then spikes at certain times (e.g., after the introduction of the smallpox vaccine, the 1986 law which granted immunity to vaccine manufacturers and led to a rapid proliferation in the vaccine schedule, and after the COVID vaccines). In each case, this increase in disease gets normalized and forgotten by the next generation of doctors (who entered practice after the last wave of sickness had become the “new normal”) and by the time its noticed, it’s often too late for them to share it (e.g., I was just speaking to a colleague who entered practice in the early 1970s and remarked that he used to have many patients in their 90s and 100s who were very mentally clear, that the dementia we frequently see in the elderly now was quite rare then, and that time it was rare to see cancers except in fairly old patients).

In turn, while I thought this model of decreasing vitality was valid (particularly since countless datasets have shown an explosion in the rates of chronic illness over the decades), it was much harder to say what was responsible as a good case could be made for so many different factors in our environment that the answer one arrived at was nearly guaranteed to be the product of one’s biases and specific focus rather than an objective assessment. Nonetheless, when I asked a variety of skilled practitioners who’d successfully treated the “unsolvable” chronic illnesses over the decades, they shared that they typically found the root issue in those diseases was one of the following:

• Heavy metal toxicity
• Dental issues (particularly root canals).
• Pharmaceutical drugs
• Vaccines
• Chemical toxicity
• Dysfunctional dynamics perpetuating in their family constellation
• Electrosmog (e.g., EMF sensitivity)
• Toxic scars (e.g., from surgeries)

Note: while not a direct cause, many also believed the demineralization of our soil (which leads to nutritionally deficient foods) and modern technology making us be disconnected from all the natural rhythms that regulate the body were also major contributing factors.

When I looked at all of this, I realized a common thread over half shared was them creating fluid stagnation (or exacerbating the consequences of fluid stagnation such as insufficient nutrients being present in the remaining blood that reaches tissues—something, which for example, often underlies macular degeneration).

Next, since Chinese Medicine holds one of the longest medical records of humanity, I was curious to see if it had observed any significant changes in humanity’s health and found out that around 1830, the concept of “blood stasis” became established as a primary cause of disease (and since that time has come to be seen as having a greater and greater importance). Since many of the highly unusual and severe injuries caused by the smallpox vaccine, introduced in 1796, matched those attributed to blood stasis in Chinese medicine, I looked up when it was first introduced to China—1805, which corroborates this theory.

Note: all of this could easily be expanded into multiple books. For those wishing to learn more, I covered the smallpox and blood stasis aspect of it in more detail here, the general loss of vitality here, how vaccines cause fluid stagnation here and the data demonstrating the profound damage vaccination has done to our society here.

Because of this, I am inclined to believe that the introduction of the smallpox vaccine (and the vaccines that followed) radically shifted humanity’s health, and that much of this was a direct consequence of the fluid stagnation (e.g., due to a loss of physiologiczeta potential) that humanity experienced. However, while there is a good case for my argument, it could also be a product of my own biases, as my approach to medicine places a heavy emphasis on fluid stagnation, and I constantly see how it links to a myriad of diseases).

Systemic Suppression

Since it is often possible to make so many different credible and persuasive arguments for a topic at hand (e.g., what’s causing this global loss of vitality), one of my approaches for filtering through them is seeing which ones then accurately predicted the future (as most don’t ultimately pan out or are retroactively crafted to explain the past).

In turn, I’ve never forgotten a conference which happened in the 1970s (I believe it was in 1974) where one of the world’s leading homeopaths convened a panel to discuss what the likely consequences would be in the upcoming decades of Allopathic medicine routinely suppressing symptoms (e.g., it aggressively treating all fevers with medications and preventing the childhood febrile illnesses with vaccination—something studies have repeatedly linked to cancer later in life).

Note: throughout the literature on the 1918 influenza, doctors from every school of medicine found influenza patients who had been treated with the fever suppressing medication aspirin (which was excessively distributed by MDs of the era) tended to be much more likely to die, while conversely, they discovered that the most effective treatments for the illness were those which then caused the fever to break on its own. Similarly, after I learned of the arguments against suppressing fevers, when I came down with a flu and did not feel well, I decided to try heating my body to see if it would accelerate the clearance of the infection and discovered not only that it did, but also that I immediately felt much better once I heated myself. This led me to conclude the discomfort the body experiences during a fever (assuming it is not an extreme fever) is not due to the heat, but rather the effort being expended to heat the body up and since then I’ve had many cases where heating the bodies (but not heads) of febrile patients greatly benefitted them.

At that conference, building upon Hering’s Law of Cure (along with the recent mass introduction of suppressive steroids), they predicted that if Allopathic medicine continued to proliferate in its mass suppression of symptoms, in the decades to follow, we would see:

•We would see a global shift from less severe illnesses to more severe ones (e.g., cancers).

•That this suppression would cause physical illnesses to be pushed deeper into the body and be replaced with psychiatric illnesses, and in time spiritual ones (particularly when the psychiatric illnesses were also suppressed with medications).

Note: the predicted psychiatric illnesses included common ones (e.g., anxiety along with depression, which at the time was rarely an issue), psychopathy, mass shootings, self-harm and self-mutilation, and the public becoming willing to do crazier and crazier things. The spiritual ailments, included people wanting to be robotic rather than spiritually connected to life, and people knowing they were spiritually adrift because they’d lost their connection to life (which otherwise would have prevented much of this dysfunctional behavior).

It was hence quite noteworthy to me that many of these shifts indeed happened, and likewise to compare just how different patients in the 1970s (especially older ones) were. However, I also feel a very strong (albeit retrospective) case can be made that the increasing proliferation of vaccinations explains this shift.

All of the previous thus touches upon one of the central criticisms of Allopathic medicine: anytime an external agent is used to forcefully change a process which is unfolding within the body (rather than aiding the body’s ability to resolve it) you run the risk of a minor temporary issue being exchanged for a severe chronic one—especially when this is repeatedly done throughout the course of someone’s life. In some cases, this risk is very justified (e.g., in a life-threatening emergency or with a relatively safe drug that has limited long-term complications). At the same time however, a general unwillingness to acknowledge this issue pervades Allopathic medicine. Now everyone’s gradually become habituated to patients “just being” sicker and sicker, and not much being possible to do about it.

Note: I believe this blindness arises in part because medical training requires doctors to be knowledgeable in a wide range of topics leading to many complex subjects being reduced to simple axiomatic truths that are memorized and then never questioned and because so much of the Allopathic therapeutic toolbox carries long term risks that it would be very difficult for doctors to practice medicine if they were fully conscious of those issues (discussed further here)

Suppressive Antibiotics

While steroids are one of the medications most associated with “suppressing” illness, many others are too. For example, for years, many natural medicine practitioners (e.g., homeopaths) also told me they’d frequently seen antibiotics “treat” an acute infection but turn it into a chronic one. I wasn’t sure what to make of this (as microbiome disruption could partially but not fully explain it) then discovered something similar existed in Chinese Medicine::

The concept of Latent Heat is very old in Chinese medicine, having been mentioned for the first time in the ‘Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine’. Latent Heat occurs when an external pathogenic factor penetrates the body without causing apparent symptoms at the time; the pathogenic factor penetrates into the Interior, and ‘incubates’ there, turning into interior Heat. This Heat later emerges with acute symptoms of Heat: when it emerges, it is called Latent Heat.

Note: in modern Chinese Medicine, antibiotics and vaccines are now proposed as sources of latent heat.

Much later, when I read Cell Wall Deficient Forms: Stealth Pathogens all of this finally made sense. This book argued that when bacteria are exposed to lethal stressors, particularly cell wall destroying antibiotics, while most will die, some will instead enter a primitive survival mode and transform into misshapen cell wall deficient (CWD) “mycoplasma like” bacteria which can radically change their size or morphology (and hence look very different). While these bacteria are hard to detect (and when seen, due to no one knowing they “exist,” often mistaken for cellular debris and ignored), with the correct techniques they can be detected. In turn, the book provides a wealth of evidence that CWD bacteria:

• Are found within many “aseptic” tissues undergoing an autoimmune attack, with specific CWD bacteria associated with many different autoimmune disorders which have no known cause.

• Once the environment is “safe” can transform back into their normal form and cause a sudden recurrence of an infection—suggesting chronic infections are due to antibiotics creating a dormant CWD population rather than continual reinfection.

Note: many popular alternative schools of medicine (e.g., those of Rife, Naessens, and Enderlein) came from microscopes which could directly observe these pleomorphic bacteria continually shifting into new morphologies, and that diseases states (e.g., cancer) correlated to specific morphologies, while other morphologies resulted in a symbiotic state of health (e.g., this a video of the organisms Naessens observed). Since the morphologies adopted correlated with the internal state of the body, this gave rise to the belief that treatments should aim to create “healthy terrains” within the body, which would give rise to non-pathogenic forms of the bacteria rather than antibiotics that provoked pathogen transformation.

All of this has influenced how I (and quite a few colleagues) practice medicine in some unique ways:

• First, around 10% of chronic conditions I come across seem to have a “pleomorphic” component and improve once that is addressed.

• Second, while sometimes helpful and necessary, I try to avoid using cell wall targeting antibiotics (e.g., penicillin) as they are particularly prone to provoking the CWD transformation.

• Third, I have found many therapies which help autoimmune conditions (e.g., ultraviolet blood irradiation) often also happen to be highly lethal to CWD. As such. I have long wondered if certain rheumatologic drugs work in this manner. For example, there was a prolonged period where minocycline (which is potent against mycoplasma) was successfully used to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but eventually abandoned as (like all tetracycles) it had some side effects, it only worked in a subset of RA cases but not others, and there was no mechanism to explain how it could be working.

Note: a case has been made that there are widespread mycoplasmal infections in the population (that possibly were lab engineered). The drug that best treated those infections was doxycycline, and I have long wondered if the reason why integrative practitioners find it helps inflammatory conditions like Lyme disease is because it is actually eliminating pathogenic mycoplasma.

Likewise, one of the most popular drugs in rheumatology, methotrexate, “works” by depleting folate production in the body, but oddly still works when folate is given to counter (some but not all) of its side effects—implying folate elimination is not its actual mechanism. Conversely however, it also has potent antibacterial properties (against specific bacteria), and rather than targeting the cell wall, it reduces bacterial DNA synthesis.

Note: many integrative physicians find that chronic autoimmune illnesses are linked to a wide range of chronic but unrecognized infections (possibly because the organisms contain antigen sequences matching normal tissue and hence provoking an autoimmune attack against it).

Read the Whole Article

The post Steroid Dangers and Safe Autoimmune Treatments appeared first on LewRockwell.

We really need a name for the mental illness that comes with obscene amounts of wealth. Elon Musk’s bizarre progeny obsession. All the weird shit Michael Jackson did. The stories you hear about rich families making their servants clean their toilets after every use or throw away plates after every meal.

Call it rich-brain or something. That psychological phenomenon where extreme wealth causes people to lose their mental moorings and spin off into deep space because there’s no one in their lives telling them “no” or holding them to any standards of normal human behavior. Where their ability to shape their day to day lives however they want with no limitations lets them fly off into uncharted psychological territory where they’ll have whole teams of people orchestrating elaborate scenes and projects to accommodate their debilitating neuroses.

We need a good label for this phenomenon because these are the individuals who are shaping our world. Many people suffering from psychological disorders will come up with unhealthy ideas for how society ought to be run, but they don’t have the means to turn their vision into a reality. The people who are made insane by obscene amounts of wealth are not restricted in this way. Their mental illnesses can actually directly influence how human civilization plays out on this planet.

As billionaires take more and more control over our world, we are finding ourselves increasingly led by those least qualified to lead us. We are trapped in a dystopia that is ruled by lunatics. We should probably do something about that.

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They’re ripping kids in half right in front of us and telling us we need to be mad at Kneecap and Ms Rachel.

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A Palestine supporter witnesses new footage every day of children being mutilated, shredded and burned to death by Israel. An Israel supporter spends every day avoiding looking at that same footage. This one fact tells you very clearly who is on the wrong side of history here.

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When you witness an injustice you can either oppose it, look away, or make up some reason why the injustice is okay. Only the first option can lead to the cessation of the injustice. Ignoring the Gaza holocaust looks different from justifying it, but both yield the same result.

There are people opposing the genocide and there are people justifying it, but the largest group by far are those standing in the middle and shrugging. These people may tell themselves that they are morally superior to the ones actively cheerleading a mass atrocity, and at first glance this may appear to be the case, but in practice both are choosing an option that allows the mass atrocity to continue. One is just more photogenic than the other. It allows a certain type of person to feel nice about themselves while still facilitating an active genocide.

This is almost everyone with the loudest and most influential voices in our society today, by the way. The celebrities. The people with the largest platforms. Most of them are not actively supporting the Gaza holocaust, they’re just sitting there watching it happen, like a psychopath sitting back watching a toddler drown to death in a swimming pool. They know something terrible is happening, but they know they’ll pay a professional price if they oppose it, so they avail themselves of the many distractions afforded to the wealthy and keep their attention fixed on the insignificant.

And the end result is that this nightmare continues. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. Because too many people, when faced with history’s first live-streamed genocide, have chosen to do nothing.

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It would be a mistake to view the Chinese people’s skyrocketing quality of life as miraculous or extraordinary. Beijing made some very clever decisions over the years, but ultimately it’s just doing the normal thing: spending the nation’s wealth on the public instead of on war.

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When capitalism simps want to shit on China they call it communist. When they want to dismiss its accomplishments they say it only happened because China became capitalist. When you ask why your country can’t do what China is doing in order to share those same accomplishments they circle back around to “No, that’s communism!” again.

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And meanwhile the war in Ukraine rages on, for no reason other than the fact that under our psychotic status quo it is much easier to start a war than to end one.

The risk of nuclear war is far lower than it was in the early months of the conflict, but Ukrainian lives are still being thrown into a proxy war to no one’s benefit but the war profiteers. NATO’s never going to directly enter the war, and without a massive escalation on that level it’s inevitable that this thing ends with a peace deal where Ukraine has to give up a fair amount of land. At this point it’s just a bunch of men killing each other and blowing each other’s limbs off for no good reason while they wait for that conclusion to arrive, because a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats far away from the fighting keep postponing it.

It’s so, so ugly and so, so stupid. Such a pointless, idiotic thing for all this suffering and dying to be happening for. This whole nightmare could have been avoided with a little diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions from the US empire, but they decided to provoke a war to move a few pieces around on the grand chessboard for the advancement of their goal of planetary domination instead.

The world is ruled by sociopaths.

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The post We Are Trapped in a Dystopia That Is Ruled by Lunatics appeared first on LewRockwell.

Even some of our brightest scientific minds are projecting that there is absolutely no positive future for our civilization if we stay on our current course.  Perhaps one of the reasons why our society has become so obsessed with short-term results is because most of us can’t bear to think about the long-term consequences of our actions.  I have a website that focuses on “economic collapse”, but it isn’t just the economy that is headed for catastrophe.  Virtually every aspect of our society is coming apart at the seams all around us, and the era that we are moving into will be more nightmarish than most people would dare to imagine.  But our political leaders continue to insist that everything is going to work out just fine somehow, and most people choose to believe them.

This week, an old MIT study from 1972 that projected that our civilization will collapse at some point during the 21st century made headlines on several major news sites…

So for the number of deaths to rise 30 percent above that level in just one year is really, really tragic.

At the same time, our system of public education continues to rapidly deteriorate.

Read the Whole Article

The post Warning About The Collapse of Civilizations. appeared first on LewRockwell.

This question came to mind from reading Edward Curtin’s essays, “At the Lost and Found,” (Clarity Press, 2025), in which he shares with readers his intellectual encounters with the rising criminality of the governments of the United States since the 1960s. Edward Curtin is a decent person with a sense of justice and a moral conscience, traits more common in his time than today.  I found his moral responses reassuring, and wonder if recent generations would respond in the same way.

Curtin, I suspect, was a member of the old moderate left, which was concerned with fairness and pushing a reform here and there.  Today this left remains only in its elderly remnants.  The modern left is not reformist.  It is revolutionary, committed to using law, government, and media to overthrow traditional society and replace it with a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel in which merit is regarded as a white racist tool.

Today the left, as epitomized by the Biden regime, pushes DEI over merit, sexual perversity over love between a man and a woman, sexualization of young children, demonization of white people as racists, and ideology over truth. Today for the left the truth resides in the ideological agenda, not in facts.

Despite the digital revolution, the Internet, social media, email, and texting, the acquisition of truthful information has become ever more difficult.  The reason is that for almost all parties concerned, it is the agenda that is important, not the facts.  A consequence is that, unlike in the past, today we live in narratives orchestrated to serve agendas. As Curtin puts it, “we are living in a pretend society” in which truth is not present.

Curtin’s essays, like my own, vary in quality, but every decent person will enjoy escape from social media into thought about what is happening to us.  I am not going to attempt to organize Curtin’s essays around a theme.  I am going to limit my comments to two of his essays. 

The first is about what has become of Christmas.  As my readers know, for several decades it has been my habit to republish my Christmas essay, “The Greatest Gift of All,” to remind people that Christianity gave us freedom and meaning in our lives.  In the Massachusetts town in which Curtin and his wife live, Christmas fireworks are a feature.  As he and his wife inside their home sit holding and trying to calm the family dogs, “sentient animals with deep feelings,” who are quaking uncontrollably, Curtin thinks of “children in Gaza quivering in fear as the Israelis bomb them night and day in savage attacks” and thinks of “the visceral sense of what those Palestinians  must be feeling as they hold their trembling children” who are declared by Israel’s leader to be “useless objects.”  

It is America’s shame that the entire government of the United States, including President Trump, the media, and the brainwashed and indoctrinated hapless American population  accept the destruction of a people, even enable it with weapons and money and deportation of persons with sufficient moral conscience to protest the genocide of a nation.  Curtin has every right to raise the question, what kind of people have Americans become?

The second essay is about Curtin’s “Known Knowns,” which consists of the massive lies that the US government has based its rule upon, regardless of whether Republican or Democrat, since the 1960s.  In a mere 8 pages Curtin presents the history of the US government’s degeneration into evil kept in power by lies.

He begins with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and goes on to Allan Dulles who engineered slaughter of one million Indonesians, the orchestrated Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal orchestrated by the CIA to drive Nixon from power, the neoconservatives’ Iran-Contra scandal, the orchestrated Persian Gulf War, the Clinton regime’s bombing of four countries in four months –Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, the 9/11 false flag attacks on the World Trade Center, the George W. Bush regime’s fake “war on terror,” used to strip Americans of civil liberties and to attack Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama who institutionalized the warfare state and bombed seven countries, Trump who allowed the deadly Covid vaccine to be imposed on us and subjects the conscience of America to the support of Israel’s genocide of Palestine, and Biden who engineered the anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, renewed war with Russia, and imprisoned American citizens for exercising their constitutional rights.

From the standpoint of the American Establishment, the problem with Curtin’s indictment is that it is true.  

In today’s America, to tell the truth is becoming an indication of treason for which whistleblowers, allegedly protected by federal law, are being imprisoned. This is not changing under Trump.  Instead, it is expanding.  If you criticize Israel, you are deported.  Thus, under the Trump regime, if you speak the truth about Israel, you are considered an enemy of the state.

Americans really do need to think about how they arrived at this position.  Curtin’s essays will help you.

The post Are Americans Still Americans? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The prospect of martial law being implemented seriously within the borders of the United States is terrifying for many, and though it is still statistically unlikely the chances that this will happen are more likely than they have been in six decades and are only increasing.

The time is now to start thinking about where you will go should your home be affected by a declaration of martial law.

Even though there is nothing illegal regarding prepping, all it takes is the stroke of a pen for that to change. If it does, you may find that you are now a target of the government and need to find places to conceal yourself.

Under normal circumstances, martial law will only last until the crisis has been resolved, but in cases of an EMP or economic collapse, you could find yourself under the thumb of the military for extended periods.

The time is now to start playing what you’ll do and where you go should martial law be instituted at the local, regional or national level.

To help you in that end we are bringing you a list of five places where you might successfully hide from the worst effects of martial law.

First Safe Locations to Hide During Martial Law

Outside the Bounds of the Affected Area

Probably the best and most elegant solution to avoiding the troubles and travails associated with living in an area under martial law is to simply get out from under that affected area.

No matter what happens, it is unlikely that a massive regional or nationwide implementation of martial law will occur.

Based on a response projection established to counter localized or smaller regional incidents, you can expect martial law to be in place in a tiny fraction of the country when it is in effect at all.

The solution, then, is simple. If at all possible, pack up your life and your family and head elsewhere.

Depending on the specifics of the declaration, this might be across the state, across state lines or even across the country. Don’t rule anything out, and be prepared that you might have to move a little farther than you would like.

Though this might be a dreadful challenge, the good news is that life will, more or less, go on as usual in the areas that are not under martial law.

Depending on your family and financial situation, you might even want to look into a drop everything vacation with an extended rental, be it a condo or house, even an extended stay hotel.

If your profession is amenable to working from home and especially working remotely via the internet, so much the better as this will only increase the attractiveness of this response.

As good as this option is, you must plan for a worst case scenario of the martial law declaration being expanded or implemented elsewhere.

If you are going to an area that itself is likely to see martial law declared you could be facing the classic blunder of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Consider carefully whether or not the prospective safe haven is known for commercial, industrial or political importance or if it is currently experiencing heightened levels of unrest that might provoke a serious government response.

The Wilderness

If you are of a conventional prepper mentality, your default plan to all kinds of societal trouble might be simply to head for deep country.

I don’t think it is any exaggeration to assert that a declaration of martial law, especially one in response to civil unrest would definitely qualify as societal trouble!

Heading out into the wilderness can definitely get you out from under the thumb of martial law and the troopers enforcing it, so it is a meaningful response, but more than most this plan has significant drawbacks to go with the perks. Let us start with the good and then we will move on to the bad.

In the park column, so long as you are not near any area of strategic interest, you really won’t be worrying about the day-to-day dealings with troopers or other officials like you would if you were near any kind of civilization currently under the effect of martial law.

This will allow you to relax and it generally live life as you would under the circumstances. Plus you being away from the bulk of the population means that attention is not going to be directed to you unless you are already wanted.

However, you are trading out one set of problems, those represented by martial law, for another set of problems, represented by the attendant challenges and difficulties of living way off grid in the wilderness.

All of your survival necessities, from shelter, food and water to security considerations must be attended to day in and day out or else you will start feeling the squeeze.

For anything but the most skilled of preppers living in the most abundant, pleasant climates this means a certain amount of dependency on supplies and accordingly, on resupply.

This option may be out of the question for some people entirely depending on the overall climate and weather where they live. The type of shelter that is amenable to you is entirely dependent on your group or family situation as well as the climate.

In some areas, retreating to the wilderness is a virtual death sentence where in others it will be more or less pleasant weather permitting.

Nonetheless, this is a viable option and one you should consider if your outdoor survival and sustainment skills are up to the challenge. If they are not, or you live in a hostile environment, discount it entirely unless you have no other option.

A Small Town

Small town living is attractive to many people, and it has many advantages likewise when we are trying to deal with the existential problem of martial law.

First, assuming you are dealing with a regional or otherwise widespread implementation of martial law smaller towns are less likely to be strategically or tactically important and so accordingly are less likely to be seriously staffed or watched by soldiers and other officials.

It is even entirely possible that there might not be an active military presence in the region at all.

Beyond the obvious benefits of being less likely to fall under the watchful eye of military forces, the culture of small towns might make them entirely more suitable for enduring martial law while you are there, whether or not the town is affected properly.

The stronger bonds between people and their ties to the community means folks are more likely to pull together and help each other in times of trouble.

At least, they are if you are known to them and in good standing with the community. Villains and outsiders are less likely to be treated with hospitality to say the least.

It is also worth considering that small towns, especially agrarian communities, are far more likely to be able to meaningfully self-sustain during the attendant economic and logistical fallout that will result from a serious implementation of martial law.

Food, water and other essentials are likely to be more plentiful, along with the skill sets needed to procure more of both. Blue collar lifestyles are alive, well and flourishing in small towns and this breeds a culture of personal readiness and grit.

However, it is worth considering second and third order effects that are likely to affect small towns if martial law is declared for reasons of domestic security.

Our military has learned time and time again that small towns and their insular nature is often amenable to the sheltering or raising of insurgents, and partisan or gorilla forces throughout history have often relied on remote villages and small towns as part of their underground network.

It goes without saying, the military already has well established and effective plans for dealing with just such a contingency.

Read the Whole Article

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Captain Chaos definitely does not have the cards – which as even South Pacific penguins know, are all made in China.

SHANGHAI and HONG KONG – So, predictably, Captain Chaos did blink first. As much as he – and his sprawling media circus – could not possibly admit it.

It all started with “tariff exemptions” – from smartphones and computers to auto parts – on products imported from China. Then it veered towards carefully manicured leaks implying tariffs “could” be reduced to a range between 50% and 65%. And finally a terse admission that if there’s no deal, a “tariff number” will be unilaterally set.

China’s Ministry of Commerce was unforgiving: “Trying to trade away others’ interests for temporary gains is like bargaining with a tiger for its skin – it will only backfire”.

And it got fiercer. The Ministry was adamant that any Trump 2.0 claims of any progress on bilateral negotiations have “no factual basis” – de facto depicting the US President as a purveyor of fake news.

Tigers, tigers burning bright: the image does not recall poetry superstar William Blake, but Mao’s legendary depiction of the US Empire as a “paper tiger” – a flashback that struck me over and over again last week in Shanghai. If the US Empire was a paper tiger already in the 1960s, the Chinese argue, imagine now.

And the pain will increase, not only for the paper tiger: any dodgy deals made by foreign – vassal – pussycat governments at the expense of Chinese interests simply will be not be tolerated by Beijing.

Last week in Shanghai I was reminded over and over again – by academics and business people – that the weaponized Trump Tariff Tizzy (TTT) goes way beyond China: it is a desperate offense ordered by the US ruling classes against a peer competitor that scares the hell out of them.

The best Chinese analytical minds know exactly what’s going on in Washington. Take for instance this essay originally published by the influential Cultural Horizon magazine breaking down the “triangular power structure” of Trump 2.0.

We have all-power Trump forming a “super-establishment”; Silicon Valley money politics, represented by Elon Musk; and the new right-wing elite represented by VP J.D. Vance. End result: a “governance system that is almost parallel to the federal government.”

European chihuahuas – caught in the crossfire of Trump 2.0 – are simply incapable of such synthetic and precise conceptualization.

Paper tiger meets fiery dragon

What a deep dive in Shanghai has revealed is that China has been handed over a rare earth-like opportunity by Trump 2.0 to consolidate its strategic initiative solidifying the role of leader of the Global South/Global Majority, at the same time carefully managing the risk of a New Cold War.

Call it a Sun Tzu move that may paralyze the Empire in its tracks. Professor Zhang Weiwei, with whom I had the pleasure to share a seminar in Shanghai on the Russia-China strategic partnership, would agree.

China is on the move across the spectrum. Chinese Premier Li Qiang sent a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishibe urging a joint drive, right now, to counteract the tariff dementia.

President Xi’s top message in his Southeast Asia tour last week was to stand up against “unilateral bullying”.

Xi deftly moved between Malaysia – current rotating chair of ASEAN, always avoiding taking sides – and Vietnam – with its “bamboo diplomacy” always hedging between US and China.

Xi told Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, directly: “We must safeguard the bright prospects of our Asian family”. Translation: let’s create an exclusive sphere of influence close to the ‘community of shared destiny’ but that does not include outside powers such as the US.

In parallel, there has been a strong debate – from Shanghai to Hong Kong – that transcends the role of China as the world’s factory: what matters now is how to redirect some of China’s astonishing manufacturing capacity towards the domestic market.

Of course there are problems – such as the lack of purchasing power among scores of Chinese domestic consumers, even as the bulk of national China income is directed to fixed-asset investments. A great deal of China’s rural elderly population survives on a monthly pension of roughly $30 a month, and the hourly rate for the gig economy has stagnated at around $4.

Meanwhile, in several high-tech fronts, China just built the fastest high-speed train on the planet: 400km/h, soon to run between Beijing and Shanghai. China is already receiving orders for the C919 commercial wide-bodied airliner. And China has come up with the world’s first thorium-powered nuclear reactor. Translation: unlimited cheap and clean energy is at hand.

The Mafia way of doing business

Hong Kong is a very special case. HSBC executives, for instance, worry about a possible decoupling between US and China – and wonder whether Hong Kong may survive without US trade.

Yes, it can. The US is Hong Kong’s third largest trade partner; yet Hong Kong’s export and import to the US are only 6,5% and 4%, respectively, of its total global exports and imports, including transshipment of goods back and forth from the mainland.

HK is a world-class logistics hub and free port. So as long as Trump 2.0 does not forbid trade with Hong Kong – well, anything can happen – imports should not be affected. Anyway, most of what HK exports – electronics, luxury goods, clothes, toys – can easily find alternative markets in Southeast Asia, West Asia and Europe.

The crucial point is that over half of Hong Kong trade is with the mainland. And the key fact is that China can easily survive without US trade. Beijing has been carefully preparing for it since Trump 1.0.

From Shanghai to Hong Kong, the best analytical minds are in tune with the inestimable Michael Hudson, who has emphasized, over and over again, how “the United States is the only country in the world that has weaponized its foreign trade; weaponized its foreign currency, the dollar; weaponized the international financial system; and treated every economic relationship in an adversarial way, to weaponize it.”

A self-confident, high-tech savvy China, from academics and business people to xiao long bao and pulled noodles vendors, graphically understands that the Empire of Chaos, in its drive to “isolate” China, is only isolating itself (and its chihuahuas).

Moreover it’s such a joy to see Michael Hudson also referring to the same “paper tiger” syndrome that I witnessed in Shanghai these past few days: “Well, America has become a paper tiger financially today. It doesn’t really have anything to offer except the threat of tariffs, the threat of suddenly disrupting all of the trade patterns that have been put in place over the last few decades.”

In Shanghai, I heard serial implacable dismissals of the so-called “Miran plan” – as in the paper published last November by Trump’s economic advisor “restructuring the global trading system”. Miran is the brain behind the Mar-a-Lago accord – whose rationale is to weaken the US dollar by forcing major economies – from China to Japan and the EU – to sell US dollar assets and swap short-term US Treasuries for 100-year bonds with zero interest.

Miran’s brilliant idea boils down to nations having only two options:

1.Meekly accept these US tariffs, without retaliation.

2. Write cheques to the US Treasury.

Zhao Xijun, co-dean of the China Capital Market Research Institute at Renmin University, destroyed the scheme succinctly: transferring money to the US Treasury like this is like “collecting protection money on the streets”. Translation: that’s the Mafia way, “a thuggish and domineering act, merely dressed up with the lofty justification of providing public goods”.

Meanwhile, in the Grand Chessboard, Beijing keeps working steadily side by side with Russia towards a Eurasian-wide security architecture anchored on a balance of powers: it’s all about the new Primakov triangle (RIC – Russia, Iran and China).

Top BRICS members Russia and China will not allow the Empire to attack fellow BRICS member Iran. And support comes in more ways than one. Example: more imperial energy sanctions on Iran? China will increase imports via Malaysia, and invest even more in Iran’s infrastructure, in tandem with Russia in respect to the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

In a nutshell: Captain Chaos definitely does not have the cards – which as even South Pacific penguins know, are all made in China.

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

The post China, Hong Kong and The Art of Blinking appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Smith. 

Mondoweiss

The post We need to talk about the pro-Israel lobby in the UK appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The post Dr Gabor Mate answers question about October 7th during conference appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Guardian

The post Who is really pushing the strings? Pro-Israel group says it has ‘deportation list’ and has sent ‘thousands’ of names to Trump officials appeared first on LewRockwell.

Chris Sullivan wrote:

Whatever You Do, Don’t Watch This Coachella Protest Against Israel & Netanyahu

I’ve never heard of this group, but I expect that they will get lots of bad publicity

or maybe fall off the edge of the earth.

The post Whatever You Do, Don’t Watch This Coachella Protest Against Israel & Netanyahu appeared first on LewRockwell.