Aggregatore di feed

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Guardian

The post I saw illegality and complicity with war crimes. That’s why I quit the UK Foreign Office appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

I’m trying to keep a talley of the billions.. oops, now over a trillion in theft since DOGE opened Pandora’s Box.

USAID is the biggest grift in America’s history.. so far.. Elon hasn’t hit the Pentagon, Treasury, IRS, State Dept, DHS, Medicare, Medicaid, NIH, DoE, DoT,DOJ,FDA,Dept of Agriculture,NATO,Soros,Clinton Foundation,Red Cross, Catholic Charities,CAIR,ADL,NAACP,ACLU,SPLC,ABA,AMA,FCC,EPA,Treasury Dpt,VA,VOA,CIA,NSA,FBIDept of Energy, DOD,IRS,HHS,CDC,Travel Expenses,FEC,insider stock trading,Government Pensions,HUD, slush funds…

See here.

The post The Dam Has Burst appeared first on LewRockwell.

Well, the cultural Marxists tried to use “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) to deceive us into adopting socialism and that has finally flopped politically.  Socialists never give up, however, for they believe they are entitled to impose totalitarian rule over us and their core philosophy is that the ends justify the means.  Including never-ending lying and censorship of all criticisms, as we witnessed in recent years.

Drum roll please.  If one Latasha Morrison, a “DEI expert,” has her way, all the same crap will continue to be pushed on school children and as many others as possible under the new synonym for socialism: “Culture of Inclusion.”  

The post The New Deceptive Synonym for Socialism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Rick Rozoff.

TASS News

The post Russian, US ambassadors to assume full duties soon appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks John Frahm.

Gateway Pundit

The post U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Files Lawsuit Against Trump Administration for Suspending Refugee Settlement Funding appeared first on LewRockwell.

____________________________________________________________________________________

di Jack Watt

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/i-costi-delle-nuove-normative-europee)

I legislatori europei hanno creato una nuova regolamentazione per il settore dell'aviazione. ReFuelEU Aviation impone l'uso di carburanti sostenibili per l'aviazione (SAF) e vieta il trasporto di carburante in cisterne, una pratica comune a livello globale. È l'ennesima iniziativa legata al clima che ostacolerà l'industria locale, aumenterà i prezzi e ridurrà la scelta per i consumatori.

Carburante economico in uscita, carburante costoso in entrata

La spinta principale è quella di aumentare l'uso di carburanti sostenibili per l'aviazione (SAF), i quali sono incredibilmente costosi. Per citare una stima prudente, i SAF sono circa il 250% più costosi del carburante convenzionale. Ciò è a dir poco allarmante perché i costi del carburante in genere costituiscono il 25-30% dei costi totali di una compagnia aerea.

Con l'obiettivo di ridurre i costi, la nuova legge mira a “ridurre i rischi” dello sviluppo: impone requisiti sull'uso di SAF, dal 2% nel 2025 al 70% nel 2050, e concede condizioni di finanziamento favorevoli ai produttori. Avranno accesso ai fondi raccolti tramite i “green bond” dell'UE e gli investimenti dal bilancio europeo, a sua volta raccolti tramite la tassazione degli stati membri. Alcuni fondi proverranno anche dalle entrate generate da un altro onere: l'Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), a cui le compagnie aeree che hanno voli all'interno dello Spazio economico europeo (SEE) e del Regno Unito sono obbligate a partecipare (l'ETS del Regno Unito è leggermente diverso ma ampiamente allineato: resta da vedere se accadrà qualcosa di simile con ReFuelEU).

Divieto al trasporto extra di carburante

Il fuel tankering è il caso in cui un operatore di aeromobili carica carburante extra su un volo specifico allo scopo di evitare, o ridurre, la quantità di carburante necessaria per il ritorno o la tratta successiva. A volte il costo del trasporto del peso extra è più che compensato dai costi più elevati del carburante all'aeroporto di destinazione. Ma i legislatori hanno deciso che poiché il peso extra comporta più emissioni, deve essere vietato su tutti i voli in arrivo o in partenza dall'UE. Questa è una logica curiosa, poiché significa che il peso extra che riduce i costi viene trattato in modo diverso dal peso extra che aumenta i ricavi (passeggeri e merci), nonostante entrambi comportino più emissioni.

Eurocontrol ha stimato che il 21% dei voli effettua la suddetta pratica in una certa misura. Ciò non sorprende, poiché i prezzi del carburante possono variare fino al 55% in Europa: si consideri il costo per portare il carburante per aerei a un'isola greca o a un aeroporto rurale (e il gasolio bruciato per portarlo lì!). La capacità di trasportare carburante extra assicura che i relativi fornitori affrontino una curva di domanda elastica. Per gli aeroporti con un unico fornitore, come molti aeroporti rurali e remoti, ora diventa anelastica al punto che le compagnie aeree smettono del tutto di servire quegli aeroporti.

Cosa significa questo per gli operatori?

L'effetto di questa linea di politica dipende dal modello di business della compagnia aerea. Ad esempio, che tipo di aeroporti serve, quanto durano i suoi voli e qual è la sua concorrenza?

Ricordate che i grandi hub hanno generalmente un panorama più competitivo rispetto agli aeroporti regionali, i quali possono avere un solo fornitore di carburante. Ciò significa che gli operatori point-to-point saranno più colpiti rispetto agli operatori hub. I primi sono generalmente i vettori low-cost, che operano più frequentemente verso aeroporti secondari e regionali che tendono ad avere prezzi del carburante meno competitivi.

Un altro fattore è che il costo del trasporto di carburante extra aumenta con la lunghezza del volo, quindi sono necessarie differenze di prezzo crescenti per giustificare il rifornimento di carburante man mano che aumenta la lunghezza del volo. Tra le compagnie aeree dell'UE una percentuale maggiore di voli dei vettori low-cost hanno tratte più brevi, sebbene anche le “major” abbiano operazioni a corto raggio. Le major dell'UE hanno un problema che le compagnie low-cost intra-europee non hanno, però: nel mercato a lungo raggio competono con gli operatori che collegano i passeggeri dal loro hub non-UE, in particolare le major del Golfo e degli Stati Uniti. Poiché solo la tratta UE è interessata da questa nuova legislazione, le compagnie UE che offrono voli diretti sono svantaggiate rispetto a quelle che offrono collegamenti tramite hub non-UE.

Vale la pena notare che questo non è il primo vantaggio relativo concesso ai vettori extra-UE dai legislatori europei. Le compagnie aeree UE e del Regno Unito hanno un'esposizione maggiore all'ETS, che è 25 volte più costosa dell'equivalente internazionale, chiamata CORSIA. Inoltre diverse nazioni applicano anche l'Air Passenger Duty, che viene imposto all'intera attività di una compagnia aerea con sede nelle nazioni interessate e tende a essere maggiore per i voli diretti più lunghi rispetto a quelli che si collegano tramite un hub intermedio.

Infine significa anche nuovi costi amministrativi. Ci sono molte ragioni per cui i voli partono con più carburante di quanto richiesto dalla legge (il carico di carburante è un punto di sicurezza, prima di tutto) e si possono immaginare modi per fare rifornimento (almeno parzialmente) senza chiamarlo così.

Conclusione

In sintesi, l'aviazione dell'UE si trova ad affrontare notevoli venti contrari con i mandati SAF e il divieto di rifornimento. Mentre i primi rappresentano una minaccia maggiore per la redditività degli operatori di tutti i tipi, il divieto di rifornimento introduce immediati aumenti dei costi. Il grado di impatto sui singoli operatori dipende dal loro modello di business e dalla concorrenza e, sebbene i vettori nativi dell'UE siano gravati più dei loro omologhi non UE, nessuno ne trae vantaggio in termini assoluti. Come sempre, quando i regolatori gravano le industrie con nuovi termini, saranno i consumatori a pagarne il prezzo: prezzi dei biglietti più alti, meno concorrenza e meno scelta.

[*] 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, Rick Rozoff:

The man who singlehandedly broke the Bank of England and plunged millions into poverty overnight. Who also used currency speculation to ruin the so-called Asian Tigers in 1997. Who was convicted of insider trading in France in 2002.

Who conspired with United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon to pay the salaries of all major government officials in the nation of Georgia immediately after the Washington-backed coup led by U.S.-educated Mikheil Saakashvili in 2003-2004 and his junta threatening and driving Russian peacekeepers out of Adjara.*

The Soros who has spent an estimated $50 billion to buy as many heads of state, media companies, newspapers, universities, think tanks and so-called non-governmental organizations, and prosecutors, cultural figures and who knows who else.

*In a joint news conference with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili at the World Economic Forum on January 22 [2004], UNDP [United Nations Development Program] Administrator Mark Malloch Brown and George Soros announced the creation of a CBF [Capacity Building Fund].

“In total, 5 thousand state officials will receive salaries from this fund. However, the main attention will be focused on employees of the law-enforcement agencies,’ Director of the Fund Kote Kublashvili told Civil Georgia.”

The post Soros panics as Trump and Elon defund and bankrupt his NGOs appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Gateway Pundit

The post Interview with Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: The Pope’s Accusations Against the Trump Government are False and Delusional. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Wow! These are the most powerful and consequential 36 words spoken by any US President. Ever.

“One of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, and I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half.’ And we can do that.”

Yes, from the Donald’s lips to god’s ear and all that. The practicalities and obstacle-strewn path from here to there may well be insuperable.

But what our twice-baked President has actually done is to blow the Overton Window of permissible national security discussion wide open. Indeed, once you say that you intend to table this fear-obliterating idea at a joint summit with the two endlessly demonized leaders of America’s purported leading foes, everything—and we do mean everything— heretofore prohibited is on the table for fresh, open discussion.

After all, you don’t need to be a student of the intricacies of the $850 billion defense budget to recognize that when you cut the Pentagon’s rations by half the whole globalist national security framework left over from the Cold War’s demise 34 years ago collapses.

That’s because you would have to bring the Empire home—and all the national security apparatus that goes with it. To wit, 750 foreign bases and 173,000 US troops posted in 159 countries; globe spanning Navy and Air Force 0perations; and alliances large and small, from NATO to the Taiwan Straits, to so-called peacekeeping missions throughout the Middle East and north Africa.

Stated differently, what you can fund on just 50% of today’s defense budget, as we amplify below, is an invincible strategic nuclear deterrent and an impenetrable defense of America’s coastlines, airspace and sovereign territory.

And yet, and yet. That’s all we actually need! It would fully accomplish the fundamental national security goal of keeping America’s 347 million citizens free and safe from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.

Indeed, whether he recognizes it or not, President Trump’s bold entreaty would amount to eschewing every notion of Empire. It would pave the way for returning to the nation’s pre-1914 policy as a peaceful Republic, safely minding its own business behind the wondrous gifts of Providence—the great Atlantic and Pacific Ocean moats which separate the American homeland from any serious potential military foe anywhere on the planet.

At the present time and for the foreseeable future, there are only two nations even remotely capable of posing a military threat to the American homeland—Russia and the People’ Republic of China. Yet the bottom line strategic reality is that Russia doesn’t have anywhere near the requisite economic heft to threaten America, and China doesn’t have a even a semblance of the economic running room to go on a global military aggression campaign.

With respect to Russia and despite all the demonetization of Putin, no one has even attempted to make the case that he’s so stupid as to believe his $2 trillion of commodity-based GDP is any match for the world-leading technology-based $30 trillion GDP of the United States.

Indeed, the whole Russian ogre thing is based on a purely fanciful derivative case. Namely, the vague arm-waving claim that Putin will take the Baltics next, then Poland and thereafter march on thru the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on the way to France, the Low Countries and across the English Channel to London—assuming Putin is also stupid enough to want to occupy the economic basket case of a Starmerized Little England.

In other words, implicit in Washington’s current consensus foreign policy posture is the notion that Russia is actually a big threat only after it attacks, occupies, pacifies and militarizes the entire continent of Europe!

That’s the only route by which Moscow can possibly get the economic heft, manpower and military means to materially threaten the US. In the end, therefore, the threat is not the Ruuskies per se, but, apparently, Russified Germans, Poles and Frogs.

Of course, there is not a shred of evidence that this is Putin’s plan or that he would remotely have the economic and military wherewithal to accomplish such a sinister purpose were he so inclined, which most evidently he is not. To the contrary, Putin’s aim by all the evidence seems to be far, far more modest: Namely, to keep NATO out of his backyard in an ancient piece of the Russian Empire that was called Novorossiya or New Russia during most of its history.

That was the name of the Donbas and Black Sea rim region before Lenin and Stalin created the artificial country of “Ukraine” for the purely administrative convenience of operating their brutal tyranny. Yet in even attempting to retake the Russian half of Ukraine, Putin is having a hard time mustering the requisite military power—to say nothing of conquering the rest of Europe.

Fortunately, VP Vance has already let the cat out of the bag, and it shows exactly why Russia is not on the warpath toward the conquest of Europe. To wit, after the impending Trump-Putin deal there will be no NATO in Ukraine and the country will be partitioned between the Russian-speaking regions of the Donbas, Crimea and the Black Sea rim, on the one hand, and the Ukrainian and Polish speaking regions of the west and on the left bank of the Dnieper River, on the other.

That’s all Putin every wanted anyway, and it will be the proof in the pudding that discredits the hideous notion that Washington must fight Russia by proxy over there in order to not have to fight it in Luxembourg or on the cliffs of Dover.

That is to say, once the war is settled and Ukraine partitioned, Putin’s special military operation will come to an abrupt halt at whatever turns out to be the line of contact between the breakaway republics and the rump of Ukraine. In turn, that will prove in spades that there exists not even the remotest prospect of a Russifed Europe, and therefore any real Russian threat to the security of the American homeland.

So, yes, the defense budget can be cut by 50% in part because the 62,000 US troops shown above that are now stationed in Europe could be brought home. Even more importantly, US NATO membership and commitments could also be abandoned, meaning that the ridiculous idea of being committed under Article 5 to the mutal defense of such nationlets as North Macedonia, whose 10,000 man active duty military is smaller than 12,000 man police force of Chicago, would also expire.

With respect to China, the single most important thing to recognize is that it is the very opposite of the old Soviet Empire, which was based on economic autarky and scant trading relationships with the world outside of the Warsaw Pact. Accordingly, had it been both inclined and capable of offensive military aggression toward the rest of Europe and or even the US—for which the now open archives of the old Soviet Union reveal scant evidence— there would have been no collateral disruption of its basic economic function. The latter was purely an internally-focused regime of centralized state socialism, which, needless to say, didn’t work but didn’t depend upon commerce with the so-called “free world”, either.

By contrast, after Mao was sent off his rewards in Red Heaven, China pivoted sharply to the outside world under the leadership of Mr.Deng and his successors; and they did so under the banner of so-called Red Capitalism, which amounted to an extreme version of export mercantilism.

Consequently, China’s exports soared by nearly 15X during the two decades between 2000 and 2022, rising from $250 billion to $3.6 trillion per year. So doing, the Chicoms essentially took themselves hostage, meaning that every province, city, village, factory, rail line, trucking operations, warehouse and port operation along the length and breadth of China got deeply entangled with just-in-time economic production for customers accross the planet, as depicted in the graphic below. Accordingly, China’s economy would collapse on the spot were Beijing to disrupt the daily flow of $10 billion of merchandise goods to Europe, the Americas and the balance of Asia.

Indeed, had its post-Mao leadership been hell bent on foreign conquest, which most clearly it was not, the Beijing regime’s very survival would have been compromised by the resulting disruption to the greatest factory-economy the world has ever seen. For crying out loud, Washington wasted 59,000 American lives and upwards of 3 million Vietnamese lives before eventually fleeing from Vietnam, yet afterwards the Chinese didn’t even try to capture Hanoi—the domino theory to the contrary notwithstanding.

In other words, China is inherently not a military threat to the US, nor is there any evidence that it is expansionist—even in its own region. There is undoubtedly a reason why after thousands of years, the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Malayans and Filipinos stick to themselves; and also why a reunification of the Han Chinese on the mainland with their kin on Formosa would have virtually zero implications for the rest of the region.

The state of Taiwan exits only because Washington stood it up in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war fair and square to Mao and the reds. Were Washington to step aside, it is likely that in a short time the Korean peninsula would be hardly distinguishable from Shanghai across the Yellow Sea.

That is to say, the US does not need the massively expensive 7th Fleet and US Marines and large parts of the Air Force to contain China. The latter’s giant Ponzi economy perched as it is on $50 trillion of debt and upwards of $4 trillion per year of exports does all the containing that America’s military security actually requires.

At the end of he day, if Donald Trump’s “America First”-focused foreign policy means anything at all, it’s that the current $1 trillion national security budget is double the size that an adequate homeland defense shield actually requires. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that in relentless pursuit of its own self-serving aggrandizement, the military/industrial/intelligence complex has massively inflated America’s Warfare State into an “extra-large” when what is really needed in the world of 2025 is a snug-fitting “small.”

And now, the Donald has dramatically opened the door to downsizing America’s crushing national security budget to exactly that, thereby paving the way for a return to Thomas Jefferson’s wise admonition urging,

“…peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Indeed, the way for the Trump Administration to shoe-horn roughly $1 trillion of defense spending into a $500 billion budget was laid out a long time ago by the great Senator Robert Taft at the very dawn of the Cold War. He argued that the modest threat to homeland security presented by the war-ravaged corpus of the Soviet Union and the collectivist disaster imposed on China by Mao could have been readily handled with–

• An overwhelming strategic nuclear retaliatory capacity that would have deterred any possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail.
• A Fortress America conventional defense of the continental shorelines and air space that would have been exceedingly easy to stand up, given that the Soviet Union had no Navy worth speaking of and China had devolved into industrial and agricultural anarchy owing to Mao’s catastrophic experiments with collectivization.

That eminently correct Taftian framework has never changed since then—even as the technology of nuclear and conventional warfare has evolved apace. For modest military spending Washington can keep its nuclear deterrent fully effective and maintain a formidable Fortress America defense of the homeland without any of the apparatus of Empire and no American boots on foreign soil, at all.

In fact, the case for a true America First policy––that is, returning to the 1914 status quo ante and a proper Fortress America military posture––has powerfully strengthened during the last three decades. That’s because in today’s world, the only theoretical military threat to America’s homeland security is the possibility of nuclear attack or blackmail. That is to say, the threat that one of its two nuclear adversaries could develop a First Strike capacity so overwhelming, lethal, and effective that it could simply call out checkmate and demand Washington’s surrender.

Fortunately, neither Russia nor China has anything close to the Nuclear First Strike force that would be needed to totally overwhelm America’s triad nuclear deterrent and thereby avoid a retaliatory annihilation of their own country and people if they attempted to strike first. After all, the US has 3,700 active nuclear warheads, of which about 1,800 are operational at any point in time. In turn, these are spread under the seven seas, in hardened silos and among a bomber fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52s–all beyond the detection or reach of any other nuclear power.

For instance, the Ohio class nuclear submarines each have 20 missile tubes, with each missile carrying an average of 4-5 warheads. That’s 90 independently targetable warheads per boat. At any given time 12 of the 14 Ohio class nuclear subs are actively deployed, and spread around the oceans of the planet within a firing range of 4,000 miles.

So at the point of attack that’s 1,080 deep-sea nuclear warheads cruising along the ocean bottoms that would need to be identified, located, and neutralized before any would-be nuclear attacker or blackmailer even gets started. Indeed, with respect to the “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, the sea-based nuclear force alone is a powerful guarantor of America’s homeland security. Even Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles couldn’t find or take out by surprise the US sea-based deterrent.

And then there are the roughly 300 nukes aboard the 66 strategic bombers, which also are not sitting on a single airfield Pearl Harbor style waiting to be obliterated either, but are constantly rotating in the air and on the move. Likewise, the 400 Minuteman III missiles are spread out in extremely hardened silos deep underground across a broad swath of the upper Midwest. Each missile currently carries one nuclear warhead in compliance with the Start Treaty but could be MIRV’d in response to a severe threat, thereby further compounding and complicating an adversary’s First Strike calculus.

Needless to say, there is no way, shape, or form that America’s nuclear deterrent can be neutralized by a blackmailer. And that gets us to the heart of the case as to how the Trump Administration could actually cut the defense budget by 50%. To wit, according to the most recent CBO estimates the nuclear triad will cost only about $75 billion per year to maintain over the next decade, including allowances for periodic weapons upgrades.

That’s right. The core component of America’s military security requires only 7% of today’s massive military budget as detailed on a system-by-system basis in the table below. Thus, in 2023 the nuclear triad itself cost just $28 billion plus another $24 billion for related stockpiles and command, control, and warning infrastructure.

Moreover, the key component of this nuclear deterrent–the sea-based ballistic missile force–is estimated to cost just $188 billion over the entire next decade. That’s only 1.9% of the $10 trillion CBO defense baseline for that period.

10-Year Cost Of US Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Per CBO Estimates, 2023 to 2032

So the question recurs with respect to the CBO’s current $989 billion baseline spending level for defense a couple of years down he road. After setting aside $75 billion for the strategic nuclear triad, how much of the remaining $900 billion+ would actually be needed for a conventional Fortress America defense of the continental shorelines and airspace?

The starting point is that neither Russia nor China have the military capability, economic throw-weight or intention to attack the American homeland with conventional forces. To do that they would need a massive military armada including a Navy and Air Force many times the size of current US forces, huge air and sealift resources, and humongous supply lines and logistics capacities that have never been even dreamed of by any other nation on the planet.

They would also need an initial GDP of say $50 trillion to $100 trillion to sustain what would be the most colossal mobilization of weaponry and materiel in human history. And that’s to say nothing of needing to be ruled by suicidal leaders—which characterizes neither Putin or Xi— willing to risk the nuclear destruction of their own countries, allies, and economic commerce in order to accomplish, what? Occupy Denver?

The entire idea that there is currently an existential threat to America’s security is just nuts. After all, when it comes to the requisite economic heft, Russia’s GDP is a scant $2 trillion, not the $50 trillion that would be needed for it to put invasionary forces on the New Jersey shores. And its defense budget is $75 billion, which amounts to about four weeks of waste in Washington’s $900 billion monster.

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

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

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

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

The fact is, in an age when the sky is flush with high-tech surveillance assets neither China nor Russia could possibly secretly build, test and muster for surprise attack a massive conventional force armada without being noticed in Washington. There can be no repeat of the Japanese strike force–the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku, and Zuikaku–steaming across the Pacific toward Pearl Harbor sight unseen.

Indeed, America’s two ostensible “enemies” actually have no offensive or invasionary capacity at all. Russia has only one aircraft carrier–a 1980s-era relic which has been in dry dock for repairs since 2017 and is equipped with neither a phalanx of escort ships nor a suite of attack and fighter aircraft–and at the moment not even an active crew.

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

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

So let us repeat: There is simply no GDP in the world––$2 trillion for Russia or $18 trillion for China––that is even remotely close in size to the $50 trillion or even $100 trillion that would be needed to support such an invasionary force without capsizing the home economy.

Donald Trump is therefore on to something huge. Namely, that Washington’s globe-spanning conventional war-fighting capability is completely obsolete!

Fully one-third of a century after the Soviet Empire collapsed and China went the Red Capitalist route of deep global economic integration, it amounts to utterly extraneous and unneeded muscle.

For want of doubt, consider that Washington equips, trains, and deploys an armed force of 2.86 million. But rather than being devoted to homeland defense, the overwhelmingly purpose is to support missions of offense, invasion, and occupation all over the planet.

As depicted in the graphic above, this obsolete Empire First military posture still includes among others–

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

All of this unnecessary military muscle stands as a costly monument to the hoary theory of collective security, which led to the establishment of NATO in 1949 and its regional clones thereafter. Yet the case for Empire and its global alliances was dubious even back then. In fact, the now open archives of the old Soviet Union prove conclusively that Stalin had neither the wherewithal nor intention to invade Western Europe.

What military capacity the Soviet Union did resurrect after the bloodletting with Hitler’s armies was heavily defensive in character and lumbering in capabilities. So the alleged communist political threat in Europe could have been wrangled out by these nations at the polls, not on the battlefield. They did not need NATO to stop an imminent Soviet invasion.

Needless to say, once the Washington-based Empire of bases, alliances, collective security, and relentless CIA meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries was established, it stuck like glue–even as the facts of international life proved over and over again that the Empire wasn’t needed.

That is to say, the alleged “lessons” of the interwar period and WWII were falsely played and replayed. The aberrational rise of Hitler and Stalin did not happen because the good people of England, France, and America slept through the 1920s and 1930s.

Instead, they arose from the ashes of Woodrow Wilson’s pointless intervention in a quarrel of the Old World that was none of America’s business. Yet the arrival in 1918 of two million American doughboys and massive flows of armaments and loans from Washington enabled a vindictive peace of the victors at Versailles rather than an end to a desultory world war that would have left all the sides exhausted, bankrupt, and demoralized, and their respective domestic war parties subject to massive repudiation at the polls.

As it happened, however, Wilson’s intervention on the stalemated battlefields of the Western Front gave birth to revolution in Russia and Lenin and Stalin, while his machinations with the victors at Versailles fostered the rise of Hitler.

To be sure, in the end the former did fortunately bring about the demise of the latter at Stalingrad. But that should have been the end of the matter in 1945, and, in fact, the world was almost there. After the victory parades, demobilization and normalization of civilian life proceeded apace all around the world.

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

So, in the post-war period world communism was not really on the march and the nations of the world were not implicated in falling dominoes, nor were they gestating incipient

Hitlers and Stalin’s. But the new proponents of Empire insisted they were just the same, and that national security required the far-flung empire that is still with us today.

So there is no mystery, therefore, as to why the Forever Wars go on endlessly. Or why at a time when Uncle Sam is hemorrhaging red ink like never before, a large bipartisan majority has seen fit to authorize $1.1 trillion per year for vastly excessive military muscle and wasteful foreign aid boondoggles that do absolutely nothing for America’s homeland security.

In effect, Washington has morphed into a freak of world history––a planetary War Capital dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, paladins of foreign intervention and adventure, and Warfare State nomenklatura. Never before has there been assembled and concentrated under a single state authority a hegemonic force possessing such enormous fiscal resources and military wherewithal.

Not surprisingly, the War Capital on the Potomac is Orwellian to the core. War is always and everywhere described as the promotion of peace. Its jackboot of global hegemony is gussied up in the beneficent-appearing form of alliances and treaties. These are ostensibly designed to promote a “rules-based order” and collective security for the benefit of mankind, not simply the proper goals of peace, liberty, safety, and prosperity within America’s homeland.

As we have seen, however, the whole intellectual foundation of this enterprise is false. The planet is not crawling with all-powerful would-be aggressors and empire-builders who must be stopped cold at their own borders, lest they devour the freedom of all their neighbors near and far.

Nor is the DNA of nations perennially infected with incipient butchers and tyrants like Hitler and Stalin. They were one-time accidents in history and fully distinguishable from the standard run of everyday tinpots which actually do arise periodically. But the latter mainly disturb the equipoise of their immediate neighborhoods, not the peace of the planet.

So America’s homeland security does not depend upon a far-flung array of alliances, treaties, military bases, and foreign influence operations. In today’s world there are no Hitlers, actual or latent, to stop. The whole framework of Pax Americana and the Washington-based promotion and enforcement of a “rules-based” international order is an epic blunder.

In that regard, the Founding Fathers got it right more than 200 years ago during the infancy of the Republic. As John Quincy Adams approvingly held,

“[America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings…She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Needless to say, peaceful commerce is invariably far more beneficial to nations large and small than meddling, interventionism, and military engagement. In today’s world it would be the default state of play on the international chessboard, save for the Great Hegemon on the banks of the Potomac. That is to say, the main disturbance of the peace today is invariably fostered by the self-appointed peacemaker, who, ironically, is inherently the least threatened large nation on the entire planet.

The starting point for a Trumpian “America First” military posture and a 50% cut of the military budget, therefore, is the drastic downsizing of the nearly one-million man standing US Army.

The latter would have no uses abroad because there would be no cause for wars of foreign invasion and occupation, while the odds of any foreign battalions and divisions reaching America’s shores are virtually non-existent. With a proper coastline garrison of missiles, drones, attack submarines, and jet fighters any invading army would become shark bait long before it saw the shores of California or New Jersey.

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

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

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

By core missions we refer to the Navy component of the strategic nuclear triad and the Navy’s large force of attack and cruise missile submarines. As it happens, here are the current manpower requirements for these key forces:

• 14 Ohio-class Strategic Nuclear Subs: There are two crews of 155 officers and enlisted men for each boat, resulting in a direct force requirement of 4,400 and an overall total of 10,000 military personnel when Admirals, overhead, support, and woke compliance is included (or not).
• @50 Attack/Cruise Missile Subs: There are two crews of 132 officers and enlisted men for each boat, for a direct requirement of 13,000 and an overall total of 20,000 including Admirals and overhead etc.

In short, the core Navy missions of a Fortress America defense involve about 30,000 officers and enlisted men or less than 6% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps. On the other hand, the totally unnecessary carrier battle groups, which operate exclusively in the service of Empire, have crews of 8,000 each when you count the escort ships and suites of aircraft.

So, the 11 carrier battle groups and their infrastructure require 88,000 direct military personnel and 140,000 overall when you include the usual support and overhead. Likewise, the active-duty force of the Marine Corps is 175,000, and that’s entirely an instrument of invasion and occupation. It’s totally unnecessary for a homeland defense.

In short, fully 315,000 or 60% of the current active-duty force of the Navy/Marine Corps functions in the service of Empire. So, if you redefine the Navy’s missions to focus on strategic nuclear deterrence and coastal defense, it is evident that more than half of the Navy’s force structure is not necessary for homeland security. Instead, it functions in the service of global power projection, policing of the sea lanes from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and platforming for wars of invasion and occupation.

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

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

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

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

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

In terms of homeland security, much of these expenditures are not simply unnecessary–– they are actually counter-productive. They constitute the taxpayer-funded lobby and influence-peddling force that keeps the Empire alive and fully funded on Capitol Hill via lavish appropriations for every manner of consultancy, NGO, think tank, research institute and countless more.

Even then, a 38% allowance or $70 billion for the Defense Department functions (which include the hidden by currently massive over-funding of the CIA and other intelligence agencies) would more than provide for the true needs of a Fortress America defense.

Overall, therefore, downsizing the DOD muscle would generate $410 billion of savings on a FY 2025 basis. Another $50 billion in savings could also be obtained from eliminating most funding for the UN, other international agencies, security assistance and economic aid.

Adjusted for inflation through the next four years of Trump’s term, the total savings would eventually come to $500 billion year.

Fortress America Budget Savings:

• Army: $140 billion.
• Navy/Marine Corps: $96 billion.
• Air Force: $65 billion.
• DOD agency-wide: $111 billion.
• UN contributions and foreign economic and humanitarian aid: $35 billion.
• International Security Assistance: $15 billion.
• Total Savings, FY 2025 basis: $462 billion.
• 8% inflation adjustment to FY 2029: +$38 billion.
• Total FY 2029 Budget Savings: $500 billion.

At the end of the day, the time to bring the Empire home is long overdue. The $1.3 trillion annual cost of the Warfare State (including international operations and veterans) is no longer even remotely affordable–-and it has been wholly unnecessary for homeland security all along.

All of this should have been obvious long ago, but the Overton Window was so narrow that the sheer nakedness of the Empire could not be spoken about in polite company. But now Donald Trump has done exactly that, and it will make all the difference in the world.

So let President Trump’s tripartite summit happen soon and begin the great defunding of the world’s hideously bloated Warfare States. The latter is now 10o-years overdue, but, at last, Donald Trump may be the best hope for peace since August 1914.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post Hallelujah! President Trump Actually Wants To Give Peace a Chance appeared first on LewRockwell.

When I was in Catholic graduate studies, our instructors would alert us to incoming papal encyclicals. Excitement would build, delectatory anticipation of what Pope John Paul might say. When it was finally promulgated, it would be all the buzz during class breaks, as we sieved out insights about suffering, women, the elderly, and always, always Jesus Christ.

Now I look back on that innocent spiritual intoxication the way I remember long-ago family Christmas celebrations when the parents and grandparents were still alive: a time of confident happiness because the elders were trustworthy and strong.

You know where I’m going: that confidence is blasted all to smithereens. I still watch for new pronouncements from the Vatican, but now I do so with a sense of dread and sorrow. At best, you can sift through documents and find one or two things to keep, allowing the rest to mercifully blur. There is no joy and little insight.

What a sad and unnecessary devolution, for people to have developed a hard shell to protect themselves from the pope and those bishops who run his playbook. Remember in 2018 when the USCCB decided to take no action on McCarrick because the pope encouraged them to wait, and then nothing ever came of it? The uproar receded, McCarrick was safely tucked away in a remote country refuge, and no one ever took action, confirming the impression that the bishops protect predators in their ranks, no matter how nightmarish.

As much as the American public is shocked by the ongoing DOGE revelations of our abuse by the Federal government, betrayal by spiritual leaders is infinitely worse. We are forced to defend ourselves against the very ones entrusted with our spiritual care.

We aren’t born with natural defenses against our parents; we are divinely designed to love and honor them. No more are we equipped to defend ourselves against priests, bishops, and the pope in the spiritual realm. We are not meant to fear them; we are meant to trust them. As prelates have abused our trust, repeatedly, they have themselves created the suspicion with which we now regard them.

After the uncountable abuses and cover-ups, the financial scandals in the Vatican, the promotion of clerics who are demonstrably anti-Catholic and the scuttling of those who proclaim Christ, after paying off accusers with little to no investigation and ruining the lives of innocent priests while failing to do a bloomin’ thing about those who patronize gay sex apps for meetups and text their lovers late at night…the bishops will have few left to support them if law enforcement arrives to investigate malfeasance.

Many of us will, in fact, thank God for whoever will clean up the Church when we could not do it ourselves because of that particularly Catholic instinct that can’t quite think ill of a bishop or priest. The secular authorities are not handicapped in that way.

As a layperson wounded by the bishops, over and over, I lament the hard-heartedness with which I now regard them. The only bishops I perceive to be interested in the spiritual well-being of their people have allowed themselves to be bound and gagged in the aftermath of Bishop Joseph Strickland’s unjust removal from his diocese. The Vatican chill factor has worked well on the rest of the U.S. episcopacy.

Had all the bishops been Stricklands, the laity would rise with good heart and vigor to defend them. As it is, corrupt or craven bishops may retain some promoters, but those will tend to dribble away with too much scrutiny by secular authorities.

The bishops missed an opportunity; they should have regarded Strickland as a prophet not a pariah.

Strickland models the good shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep, and the laity know that instinctively. But those who fatten themselves on their flocks, or decline to speak words of warning when the flock is in mortal danger, face penalty. There is no shortage of admonition in Scripture about the behavior of shepherds, who are held to such a high standard because the sheep are virtually defenseless in the hierarchical structure of the Church.

Woe to the shepherds of Israel, who only feed themselves! They eat the fat, wear the wool and butcher the fattened sheep, but do not feed the flock. (Ezekiel 34:2-3)

You have scattered my flock and driven them away, and have not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for the evil of your deeds, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:2)

Like ravenous dogs, they are never satisfied. Shepherds with no discernment, they all turn to their own way, each one seeking his own gain. (Isaiah 56:10-11)

Read the Whole Article

The post Bishops Burning Bridges appeared first on LewRockwell.

If you are puzzled why Democrats and the US Civil Service are begging judges to prevent the Trump administration from having access to official US government data, the Social Security data alone explains it.

The US population according to the CensusBureau is 334 million, but according to current Social Security records, there are 398 million people with active Social Security numbers.  In other words, 64 million more people have US Social Security numbers than exist.

According to the Social Security Administration’s official data, there are two active Social Security accounts of people who are older than the United States.

According to the Social Security Administration, there are active Social Security numbers for 3.6 million Americans between the ages of 110 and 119 years of age; 3.4 million between the ages of 120-129 years of age;  3.9 million between the ages of 130-139; 3.5 million between the ages of 140-149, and to pass by these absurd active Social Security numbers, we have the Social Security Administration attesting to the fact that there are 1,039 active Social Security numbers for people aged 220-229 years old.

Who is receiving these benefit checks?  This is what the corrupt judiciary is keeping secret by blocking DOGE, claiming it is a violation of privacy. 

It must be the privacy of dead people or zombies.  Here is Elon Musk’s X release.

Here is Coffee and Covid’s account.

Trump and Musk are trying to restore the integrity of the US government and to stop the theft of government revenues and the intrusiveness of government into our lives.  Over the course of my life government has become intrusive in ways that were impossible when I was young.  For example,  I still have my first Social Security card from 1957 needed for my first job in a Columbus, Georgia, cotton mill at $1.00 per hour.  My take-home pay for a  40 hour week, 7am – 3pm, was $33.00.  My Social Security Card says in large red letters, “NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION PURPOSES.”

In America today you cannot do anything without using your Social Security card or number for identification.  Your Social Security number, not your name, has become your identity, an identity that the digital revolution makes it easy for criminals to steal.  

Did you read  in the whore media about this extraordinary fact that Social Security accounts exceed the population?  Of course not.  The official narrative is that Trump is going to balance the budget by ending Social Security payments.  This is more fake news from the whore media that told us Trump was a Russian agent.  Instead of cutting Social Security payments, Trump wants to stop the fraud.

The post Social Security Has More Active Social Security Numbers than the United States Has Population appeared first on LewRockwell.

I was asking this question recently when the nightmare of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians greatly disturbed my reflections and took me in another writerly direction. Now I wish to return to this matter that seems perpetually pertinent, a pertinence, of course, not unconnected to the dead in Gaza, Ukraine, and everywhere else. There are so many ways of getting dead – and living – that complicate my question.

I am certain of this, however, that there is much to be said for talking to the dead, even asking them if they are nostalgic.

I have just awakened from a night of dreams in which I was cavorting with a bunch of the dead and they told me many things, one of which was to pursue my question into my daydreams, which this essay may be called, in the etymological sense of that word – to essay, that is, to try, to experiment without knowing where one is going. Surely one does not want to forget that life is an experiment into the unknown, as is its companion – death. And that all travel ends in the enigma of “arrival.”

Michel de Montaigne spoke for me when he said: “I am by nature not melancholy, but dreamy. Since my earliest days, there is nothing with which I have occupied my mind more than with images of death. Even in the most licentious season of my life, amid ladies and games. . . .” So too for me, no matter how fiercely in my youth I competed on the basketball court to win accolades and the admiration of the ladies, I always felt I was performing for a deeper reason that I couldn’t articulate at the time but which I vaguely sensed.

I got a hint of it once, when after a game in which we won against our arch-rival and I played very well, a visitor to the locker room congratulated me by saying, “Great game,” and I responded with false modesty, saying “It was okay,” knowing that I did play very well but was unable to accept the compliment. I have never forgotten that incident that suggests to me that there was something deeper than playing well and just winning a game that I was after, and that my stupid response to the compliment revealed – or did it conceal? – this from me.

So I wonder: Why am I writing this essay? To win your applause? Something more? I know I am writing it for myself, but I could keep it private.

Perhaps you will agree that the question about the dead’s nostalgia is a touchy philosophical question that might have no definitive answer. Even if we could, in modern data-driven fashion, construct a sociological survey, how would we choose a “representative” sample of the dead? Where would we find them – up, down, way out there, next to us? The thought of it seems flippant in an impossible way, which it is, but its flippancy holds a secret message.

So I asked the dead who would speak to me and got a few mixed, muffled replies. You can understand their reluctance to say anything.

If I heard correctly, one of them said, “You should ask the living.” Another, who seemed offended that I considered him dead, said, “Why are you asking me?” Most didn’t answer, which had me wondering why. Were they disgusted with us?

But then I wondered: Who are the dead? That too is a touchy question.

I have always heard that nostalgia was not good for you since it kept you rooted in the past; that this ache for home (Greek, algos, pain + nostos, homecoming) – the good old days that may or may not have existed but you miss them nevertheless – prevented you from living Zen-like in the present or looking forward to the future.

Yet the English writer and art-critic John Berger suggested otherwise when he wrote that, paradoxical as it seems, there is also a nostalgia for the future that is hopelessly desired, not hopelessly lost. A journey, propelled by an “indefinable ache,” to an imagined future created out of recollected moments of love and beauty. While often found in the work of artists of all types, it is available to everyone open to revelations from out of the blue. But one must imagine, as John Lennon sang.

So I wondered if nostalgia could be a form of utopian hope at a time when humanistic utopian thinking is at a nadir, overwhelmed by constant bad news, subtle propaganda wherein contradictions and truths coexist in chaotic indifference, and the machine dreams of people like Elon Musk and the digital devils like those at the World Economic Forum and in Silicon Valley.

The denigration of nostalgia assumed you were alive. I was wondering about the dead. What did they think? Did they wish they were alive? Was being alive the good old days for them, or did they feel they were finally home and that life had been a dream?

Or did the dead have no future, no nothing, or perhaps some afterglow of sorts, an everlasting rest in peace, whatever that may mean, a phrase that always seemed to me a bad knock on life. Who wants to sleep forever as cemeteries (Greek koimeterion, sleeping place, dormitory) remind us by their eerie silence?

If sleep is peace, why bother to wake up in the morning?

But what about the other dead, the living-dead? Had they killed all livingness in themselves in order to avoid another death? To paraphrase T.S. Eliot – Were we led all this way for death or birth? Yes, the enigma of arrival.

I guess I was thinking that if I could get in touch with the dead and get them talking, they might also tell me what it was like to be dead. Although I am no statistical whiz, I figured there were a lot more of them than the living, and the odds were pretty good that someone there would spill the beans.

I thought of this recently when watching the new film about Bob Dylan’s early years, A Complete Unknown, when his film girlfriend, Sylvie Russo, based on the real Suze Rotolo, gets angry at him for concealing his true past and identity, and he replies, “People make up their past, Silly, they make up what they want; [they] forget the rest.”

This has a ring of truth to it, whether it’s from memory lapses or some sense of wanting to fictionalize their pasts for reasons known only to them. Our memories and forgetteries are interesting creative faculties.

But as I said, I was interested in the dead. Did they also do that? Were they nostalgic in the looking-back sense?

Yet their silence was deafening. I grew very frustrated. I felt my proclivity for abstruse questions might be leading me astray, away from my own nostalgia, an easier question to answer.

This thought came to me when I just heard the bell ring on my Hermes manual typewriter, and I returned the carriage to type these words.

Ah, the bells, the calling of the bells, their tinkling and tolling, the bells for meals at the Edgewater Farm of my youth, the bells of St. Brendan’s grammar school calling us to freeze our positions as we played in the street during lunch break, my tinkling of the bells in the sacred hush as an altar boy, the church bells still ringing at St. Peter’s church in town, Bob Dylan’s song Ring Them Bells, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells and Phil Ochs’ version in song, Leonard Cohen’s vesper bells in When Night Comes On, ringing for me, calling me somewhere, resonating “to the tintinnabulation that so musically wells” up thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears or laughter.

I hear the bells, but I still do not know if the dead are nostalgic.  It seems like the wrong question. For this daydream in words has brought me to that enigmatic place of arrival where I am nostalgic for my dear departed dead loved ones.  They still talk to me, but don’t answer obnoxious questions.

As for the past, I can echo the concluding words of Don DeLillo’s alter-ego, Nick Shay, in his great novel Underworld:

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real.  This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

As for the living, John Donne summoned it up:

Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Are the Dead Nostalgic? appeared first on LewRockwell.

In the nineteenth century, the Americans invented a new sport—baseball. At one time thought of by us Britons as a sort of “poor man’s cricket,” baseball eventually became an international sport and, at this point in time, in virtually any country in the world, the exclamation “Three strikes—you’re out” means to all and sundry that the individual in question is finished for the time being.

And the phrase is sometimes used in investment circles. One investor can be heard advising another, “Don’t buy that stock—they’re underfunded, have poor management and an unsustainable business plan. You’d have three strikes against you even before you started.”

If the investor receiving the advice is wise, he would, of course, avoid the stock as he would avoid a plague. Although there might be some chance of success, the odds are so thoroughly stacked against him that he’s almost certain to lose his money.

But what of an entire country where the investor has three strikes against him before he starts? What if some country were to pass a series of laws that were so draconian that, whilst it may be possible that the investor might survive, the odds are stacked so much against him that loss is almost a certainty?

An excellent example of such a country is the home of baseball—the USA. Once regarded worldwide as “the land of opportunity,” the US has declined precipitously in recent decades and, as developed countries go, has become one of the world’s dodgiest jurisdictions in which to retain wealth.

Strike One: Confiscation of Wealth

In 2010, the US government passed the massive (2,300 pages) Dodd-Frank Act. Ostensibly, Dodd-Frank was intended to end the excessive risk-taking that had led to the 2008 crash. Although Congress could simply have reinstated the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (a mere 37 pages, the 1999 repeal of which led to the crash), it passed Dodd-Frank. Many congressmen admitted that they had never even read it before passing it. Unfortunate. Buried in that bill was legislation that allowed the opposite of what the bill was claimed to have been meant to do. It allowed US banks to confiscate account holders’ deposits—in other words, it codified the bail-in process.

Although no confiscation has yet taken place, a trial balloon for confiscation was sent up in Cyprus in 2013 and the world accepted the concept. The path is now paved for similar confiscation in the US. In essence, this means that any funds that are entrusted to any bank in the US are unsafe.

Strike Two: Civil Forfeiture

The stated purpose of the civil forfeiture law is to seize property that may have been connected in some way to a crime. In the 1980s, the US Congress gave the green light to law enforcement agencies to retain the proceeds of their seizures. In addition, the traditional “innocent until proven guilty” principle was thrown out. The onus was now on the accused to prove that his property was not connected to a crime. If he could not do so, the authorities could keep the proceeds.

But the enforcement of this law has not been focused on wealthy drug kingpins. Nationwide, it has been focused on the average citizen, who is limited as to his ability for recourse. Typically, he’s stopped by police as he’s driving down the road. His possessions (particularly cash) are seized on the claim of a minor traffic offense. Another method of seizure is to raid a home or business premises. Often, anything of value is taken, under the assumption that it “may have been connected to a crime.” And often, the charges are trumped-up and the arguments flimsy.

The accused must then fight in court to regain his property, which happens rarely. Most cases never reach the courtroom. In many that do, the individual finds he cannot afford the legal fees, so he either gives up or settles. Abuses abound and in some jurisdictions, seizure has become a full-time activity, netting hundreds of millions in value, little of which is ever returned, even if no charges are ever filed against the accused.

Strike Three: Removal of Free Speech

In December of 2016, the US Congress passed the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, following a television campaign warning that “fake news” created by Russia had increased support for presidential candidate Donald Trump, allowing him to defeat Hillary Clinton.

The law provides for the implementation of an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation” that ostensibly threatens “security” and “stability.”

No single government agency has been charged with the enforcement of this law, which suggests that any government agency that objects to published information that disagrees with its own will have the power to take action. It may punish “the extensive and destabilising foreign propaganda and disinformation operations being waged against us.”

The upshot of this is that the US government will have the authority to crack down on any group or individual that it decides is disseminating “propaganda,” including punishing and/or shutting down any source it deems guilty of disseminating information that does not match its own propaganda.

And so, returning to our investor, he’s looking at a country in which he already has three strikes against him. He’s almost certain to lose. What will he do? Well, sad to say, human nature dictates that he’s most likely to simply put his head in the sand and continue on regardless. If he’s already neck-deep in the US investment game, he’ll be inclined to continue and hope for the best, much to his eventual regret.

Historically, whenever any country declines to the point that its government has removed the rights of property ownership and freedom of speech, most people do tend to just hang in there and ride the train to the bottom.

Very few choose to vote with their feet and decamp to another jurisdiction where the laws are not so draconian. For whatever reason, that which is so easy to understand in baseball is very hard to understand with regard to investment and residency.

This originally appeared on International Man.

The post Three Strikes—You’re Out! appeared first on LewRockwell.

You’ve got to wonder who at CBS-News thinks it’s a good idea to quadruple down on mendacious grandstanding when the network faces a $20-billion lawsuit from Donald Trump — for assisting Kamala Harris’s campaign (aka election interference) — while the FCC under new Commissioner Brendan Carr questions the network’s license to operate on the grounds of “news distortion” and violation of the broadcast news fairness doctrine.

So, on Sunday night February 16, CBS’s flagship news show, 60-Minutes, pitched a doubleheader of knowingly faked-up feature pieces intended to scramble American minds to benefit the Party of Chaos and its manager, the US Intel Blob. The first piece was a sob-story on how sad and unjust DOGE’s deconstruction of the USAID money-laundering operation is. Yeah, boo-hoo. They interviewed several part-timers and consultants pretending to be long-term employees of the outfit. Complete horse-shit, and they knew it. What really matters is that a whole lot of bureaucrat grifters (and politicians) won’t get paid anymore. . . and the Blob won’t be able to soften-up faraway nations for plunder with its color revolutions and other hijinks.

The second piece was a ringing endorsement of Germany’s current censorship campaign, arresting ordinary citizens for mean tweets. Their camera crew followed the German Gedankenpolizei entering apartments and seizing cell phones. The viewing audience was asked to shed tears for German Green Party politician, Renate Künast, who got dissed on “X” (“misogynist comments” and insults) — the same week that an Islamic immigrant maniac drove a car into a Munich crowd on-purpose, injuring 39 people, including two dead (one, a child). No mention of that incident on 60-Minutes, or, more generally, that illegal immigration is the big taboo subject behind all the censorship.

CBS actually preceded that gaslighting job with a bit of Sunday morning constructed Orwellian fake syllogistic idiocy by Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, who said that free speech caused the Holocaust against the Jews. Her reasoning: free speech allowed the Nazis to gain power, therefore. . . Auschwitz . . . therefore, free speech is bad. Guest, Sec’y of State Marco Rubio, told her that he could not associate himself with her thesis. In fact, once in power, the Nazis totally controlled speech and news and did not permit other political parties to even exist. All of this, you understand, is just deliberate Gramscian distortion-and-perversion of language — black is white, up is down — to defeat any attempt at coherent public debate today.

The conclusion you might draw from all this is that CBS is terrified of free speech, and is trying desperately to hide the Blob’s long-running criminal racketeering activity — which they have aided and abetted for years and deserve to lose their license over, plus pay billions in penalties, and go out of business — a rather existential predicament.

Reality distortion is no longer working so well with Mr. Trump in the White House. Here is what’s behind the USAID brouhaha and why it matters. By 2016, the Blob had become a fullblown, independent, parasitical organism on US governance. It had several purposes: 1) to keep itself in perpetual power by paying off its voting blocs of “the poor and marginalized,” 2) to pay its corps of bureaucrat managers (of the “poor and marginalized”) handsome salaries to win their everlasting allegiance, and 3) to pay-off elected officials to keep voting the money flows for all that. All this created a massive class of Democratic Party activists dedicated to overthrowing the republic so as to usher-in their social equity nirvana. And all that was sheer hubris. More recently, nemesis arrived on the scene and all this institutional Blob power had to be diverted to a massive ass-covering operation, now in full, florid failure. And, worst of all for the Blobists, evidence of actual crime is accruing at a frightful, fast pace.

With the confirmation of Kash Patel later this week, Mr. Trump’s agency team will be complete. What follows will be a Krakatoa of revelation, drastically altering the climate of US politics for years to come. You should learn exactly how many FBI and CIA agents were moiling and roiling in the J-6 mob. You’ll find out what the J-6 DNC pipe bomb caper was all about. You’ll find out why RussiaGate was never properly investigated or adjudicated. . . how the Adam Schiff / Alexander Vindman / Eric Ciaramella impeachment op worked. . . how the Clinton Foundation made a zillion dollars . . . where all the money went that got poured into Ukraine. . . and much much more.

You will also soon start getting some actually reliable information out of CDC, FDA, NIH, and other public health agencies. Do you suppose that Tony Fauci is the only person who must answer for Covid-19? I expect many of the following persons who were high-ranking officials — nearly all of them completely obscure to the public — to be asked under oath what they thought they were doing:

Robert R. Redfield, M.D. — Director of the CDC

H. Clifford Lane, M.D. — Deputy Director for Clinical Research and Special Projects, Clinical Director, NIAID

Sarah W. Read, M.D., M.H.S. — NIAID Principal Deputy Director

Jill R. Harper, Ph.D. — NIAID Deputy Director, Science Management

Carl W. Dieffenbach, Ph.D. — NIH Director, Division of AIDS

Daniel Rotrosen, M.D. — NIAID Director, Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation

Emily Erbelding, M.D., M.P.H. — NIAID Director, Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases

Anne Schuchat, M.D. — Principal Deputy Director, CDC

Sherri A. Berger, Ph.D. — Chief Operating Officer, CDC

Debra Houry, M.D., M.P.H. — Acting Director, CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control

Nancy Messonnier, M.D. — Director, CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. — Director, NIH

John Jernigan, M.D., M.S. — Director, Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion

Ruth A. Etzel, M.D., Ph.D. —Director, National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR)

Dana Meaney-Delman, M.D. — FDA Acting Director, Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response

Lawrence A. Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D. — Principal Deputy Director, NIH

Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D. — Director, National Institute of Mental Health

Walter J. Koroshetz, M.D. — Director, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

Gary H. Gibbons, M.D. — Director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

Richard J. Hodes, M.D. — Director, National Institute on Aging

Shannon N. Zenk, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.N. — Director, National Institute of Nursing Research

I’m sure many more names can be added to the list. They must have known, and found out early on, that Covid-19 was created with US Government grants (possibly through DARPA), that the mRNA vaccines were ineffective and harmful, that the lockdowns were shuck and jive, and that public health officials were paid a lot of money in royalties while all this was going on. If they haven’t shredded or deleted the info — and it’s still possible that Tulsi Gabbard can find it, anyway — the gaslight will finally get turned off and the sunlight will shine in. You know this is going to happen.

Reprinted with permission from JamesHowardKunstler.com.

The post Krakatoa Blows appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph has been caught trying to orchestrate what can only be described as a mass media psyop to inflame public hysteria about antisemitism in Australia.

In a project internally titled “UNDERCOVERJEW” supposedly designed to show “what it’s like being Jewish in Sydney”, a man wearing a Star of David hat and video glasses went around targeting Muslim and Arab businesses trying to instigate hostility from staff members trailed by a video producer and a Telegraph reporter.

The man, who is reportedly associated with the Australian Jewish Association, entered an Egyptian cafe called Cairo Takeaway and postured with his Star of David hat without getting any reaction from anyone. He then started making comments to cafe staff, who caught on to what he was doing and started recording him. Police were then called and it caused a big scandal.

We saw a similar incident earlier this month when headlines blared about an “antisemitic attack” at Bondi Beach involving eggs being thrown at a group of young women. A couple of days later it came out that the egging was perpetrated by two teenagers getting up to teenage mischief and had nothing to do with anyone hating Jews.

Right now we’re seeing an uproar over two Arab Australian nurses who were baited by an Israeli influencer into saying on the website Chatruletka that they would kill Israelis if they came into their hospital. The comments by the nurses were obviously extremely ill-advised and unethical, but a police investigation has so far found that they’ve never harmed anybody, and if you watch the extended footage of the exchange it’s clear the influencer went out of his way to inform them that he served in the Israeli military and killed Palestinians. One of the nurses has reportedly lost 70 family members to Israeli atrocities in Palestine.

Without defending the irresponsible comments of the nurses, I don’t think anyone would expect a Jewish person who came in contact with a Nazi soldier in the 1940s to maintain their cool and avoid violent speech, much less so if that person had lost family members in the Holocaust, and even less if they believed they were having a conversation in private. These chat roulette sites are not intended as mass public broadcast forums; people participating in them tend to interact on the assumption that they are having a private conversation, so the exchange should be viewed as angry words being hurled at a perceived abuser, not as a public declaration of intent to harm others. I don’t condone a healthcare provider saying she’d kill Israeli nationals in her hospital, even if she has lost scores of family members in the Gaza holocaust. But I also wouldn’t confuse what I was seeing with evidence of an antisemitism crisis in Australia.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1882247975201632352

There is a concerted effort to manufacture the illusion of an antisemitism crisis in Australia in order to protect Israeli information interests — and the call isn’t coming entirely from inside the house. Albanese has acknowledged that the perpetrators of a spate of allegedly antisemitic attacks in this country may have been paid actors working for foreign operatives. The prime minister refused to speculate as to which country might be sponsoring these incidents which just so happen to greatly benefit the interests of Israel, but you don’t exactly need to be Sherlock Holmes to narrow it down.

And some of these so-called “antisemitic” incidents are so obviously staged it hurts. When you see graffiti on a synagogue with “Free Palestine” written next to swastikas, it calls to mind the Mississippi man who notoriously claimed in 2015 that his driveway had been vandalized by black activists with graffiti that said “BLACKS RULE”.

Apparently we’re all supposed to take very seriously the idea that either (A) Nazis are spray painting the words “Free Palestine” next to their swastikas, or (B) that supporters of Palestinian rights are spray painting Nazi symbols next to their pro-Palestinian slogans. And we are never meant to consider the possibility that this incident was staged by Israel’s supporters or by paid actors working for foreign Zionists.

It is always okay to express skepticism about dubious incidents of “antisemitism” in today’s political environment. Israel’s supporters are shitty, evil people who support genocide, and faking antisemitic incidents is a standard hasbara tactic with a well-documented history.

There is no antisemitism crisis in Australia. There is an anti-Palestinian crisis in Australia. An anti-Arab crisis in Australia. A pro-genocide crisis in Australia. The fact that our politicians and media have been shrieking their lungs out 24/7/365 about a made-up epidemic of abuse against Jews while standing with Israel and its American sponsors as they demolish Gaza and prepare to ethnically cleanse a Palestinian territory shows that there is indeed something deeply and profoundly sick about our society — but that sickness has nothing to do with antisemitism.

There are of course people with hateful attitudes and superstitions toward Jews to be found in any country, but they are a small fringe group whose beliefs have far less meaningful impact on people’s lives than prejudices against Palestinians, immigrants, or Indigenous Australians. The average Australian spends very little time thinking about Jews and Jewishness one way or the other, and we’d spend far less if we weren’t constantly being bombarded with false messaging about how our country is full of dangerous Jew haters.

Antisemitism exists in the same way discrimination against divorced mothers exists; it used to be a major issue that did great harm, but in terms of how much it actually affects people’s lives in modern secular times it’s mostly just an obsolete relic of the past. As a divorced mother I might run into the occasional weirdo on the internet calling me a harlot if I mention my personal history, but life is infinitely easier for people like me than it was a century ago. Antisemitism is the same.

Generally when you hear people talking about incidents of antisemitism it falls into three separate categories which are too often conflated:

1. People conflating support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews. This is the most common category by an extremely massive margin.

2. People conflating October 7 with a Holocaust-like event in which Jews were murdered simply for being Jewish. In reality October 7 was an act of desperation by the oppressed inhabitants of a giant concentration camp, and they would have killed their oppressors regardless of their religion.

3. Real hatred of Jewish people and real attacks on Jews because they are Jewish. This, while relatively uncommon, is being made more common by Israel’s practice of committing genocide under a Star of David flag while claiming to represent all Jews.

Israel apologists always go out of their way to conflate these three categories. The Anti-Defamation League officially made this conflation a standard practice in 2023 by categorizing incidents of pro-Palestinian activism as antisemitic incidents. The Anti-Defamation League recently drew controversy by saying that Elon Musk’s infamous Nazi salute was not antisemitic, while we’re on the subject.

There is no antisemitism crisis in Australia. As The Daily Telegraph and their agent provocateur found out, antisemitism is one crisis we don’t have. They tried to provoke an antisemitic reaction, and they failed. No one cared.

The real crisis in Australia is that we are the kind of country that would sit and watch a live-streamed genocide without moving heaven and earth to stop it. We have a morality crisis. An apathy crisis. A crisis of our hearts, minds and souls. But what we do not have in this country, in any meaningful way, is an antisemitism crisis.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

The post There Is No Antisemitism Crisis In Australia. It’s A Carefully Constructed Lie. appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Wednesday evening, Peter took to his podcast to cover the week’s big economic headline: inflation is still running hot. In this episode he covers this week’s alarming CPI figures and the political fallout they caused. These metrics highlight just how unprepared Powell and the Fed are for coming stagflation.

To kick off the podcast, Peter reminds us of his long-held warnings about rising inflation and the Fed’s mismanagement:

I don’t often say, I told you so, but sometimes I just got to say, I told you so. I have been warning on this podcast for over a year that inflation was going to get worse, that the Fed aborted the hiking campaign prematurely, that the Fed never got rates into restrictive territory, that despite the claim that they were fighting inflation, they continued to stoke the fire, and that the fact that we pulled back from 9% to 2.5% or whatever we got down to, that was just a cycle, a temporary pullback that we had formed a base, and that we were headed higher, and that we were not going to get to 2%.

Peter comments on Jerome Powell’s congressional testimony from earlier this week, critiquing his lack of accountability and unwillingness to address critical issues head on:

Every time they ask him about a particular policy … he says, ‘I can’t answer that. I can’t talk about politics. I don’t want to comment on the wisdom.’ This is exactly what he said. ‘I don’t want to comment on the wisdom of what you guys do.’ I just want you guys to do whatever you want and I’ll deal with it. What the hell? I mean, so he’s saying that even if I think you’re about to do something really stupid that’s going to be harmful to the economy, I’m just going to bite my tongue and let you do it.

He is equally scathing when discussing what he believes should be the correct response to surging inflation:

The Fed should be hiking rates. They should have hiked rates today, intra-meeting. They should be like, ‘… We totally got inflation wrong. We really screwed up with these rate cuts. We need to take all 100 basis points back. In fact, we need to go up 100. We need 200 basis points right now. We need to quickly go to where we should be before this really gets out of hand.’ But of course, they’re not going to do that.

Peter casts doubt on the conventional wisdom regarding inflation management, especially when it comes to the gold market:

But what the traders don’t realize, and this applies even more so to the gold market, is that that’s not what it means. Higher inflation doesn’t mean the Fed is going to fight harder to win. It means the Fed has already lost. They have surrendered. Inflation is going to keep going up, and the Fed is not going to do anything about it. It’s not that they’re not cutting. It’s that they’re not hiking. The Fed should be hiking rates.

He also explains the counterintuitive market reaction to the CPI news, noting the disconnect between algorithmic responses and common sense:

But actually, before I get to gold, the dollar, because the dollar, again, had the typical knee-jerk reaction. When this number came out, the dollar immediately spiked. Why? Because that’s how the algorithms are programmed to react to inflation news. If it’s worse than expected, you buy dollars. The opposite of what common sense would tell you to do, you find out that your dollars are losing value faster than you thought, that is not a sign to go out and buy more of them.

Finally, Peter issues a prediction for the next time inflation comes in hot:

Months ago, a CPI report like this would have sent gold down for the count that day. It would have gone down 40 or 50 bucks or 60 bucks, and it wouldn’t have recovered. It would have closed near the lows. The markets are waking up to this reality that bad news on inflation is actually good news for gold. Eventually, we’re going to have huge rallies. Gold is going to be up 50, $100 when we get bad inflation news, because it just confirms why you need to own gold, because inflation is running out of control, and the Fed is not doing anything about it.

This originally appeared on SchiffGold.com.

The post Hot CPI Sends Gold Higher appeared first on LewRockwell.

President Trump has ordered the U.S. Mint to stop producing pennies. The reason is that it’s too costly to produce them. It costs the Mint nearly four cents to produce one penny.

The penny phenomenon is good example of what the federal government — and, specifically, the Federal Reserve — has done to our money. Ever since the Fed and a paper-money system were established in 1913 and the 1930s, the Fed has destroyed the value and stability of American money.

For more than 100 years, the official money of the United States was gold coins and silver coins. That’s because the U.S. Constitution established a gold-coin/silver-coin monetary system. We know that because the Constitution gave the federal government the power to “coin” money. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, one does not “coin” paper money. One “coins” money out of metals. We also know that the Constitution expressly prohibited the state governments from making anything but gold and silver legal tender.

The Framers wanted nothing to do with paper money. They knew what government officials throughout history have done with paper money. They have printed it to their heart’s content to pay for their ever-increasing expenditures. At the risk of further belaboring the obvious, one cannot print ever-increasing amounts of gold coins and silver coins.

America’s official, constitutional gold-coin/silver-coin system contributed to the phenomenal increase in the standard of living of the American people in the late 1800s. That’s because the value of people’s money was stable and predictable.

In the 1930s, however, this constitutional monetary system came to a screeching halt. Without even the semblance of the required constitutional amendment, the Franklin Roosevelt regime decreed the end of America’s constitutional monetary system, in favor of a paper-money system that the Framers had rejected. In one of the most infamous acts in U.S. history, FDR ordered every American to deliver his gold to the U.S. government in return for irredeemable paper money. If a person refused to do so, he would be prosecuted for a federal felony offense for owning what had been the official money under the Constitution for more than a century.

Interestingly, FDR didn’t make it a felony to own silver coins. For a while, silver coins continued to circulate. But over time, Gresham’s Law in economics came into play. Gresham’s Law holds that bad money will drive good money out of circulation. That’s what happened with silver coins. Given that the cost of producing silver coins was increasing, the U.S. Mint began resorting to cheap alloyed coins to lower its cost of producing the coins. Given a choice between using silver coins and alloyed coins, people resorted to hoarding the silver coins and using only the alloyed coins in their daily transactions. Thus, the good coins — the silver ones — ended up disappearing from circulation. That’s how Gresham’s Law operates.

For example, suppose you have four silver quarters in your pocket that were minted long ago. You also have four cheap alloyed quarters that were just minted just recently. You walk up to a vending machine to purchase a soft drink that costs one dollar. Which coins are you going to use — the silver ones or the cheap alloyed ones?

Why does this phenomenon occur? Because of the paper-money system and the Federal Reserve System that statists brought into existence and that the Framers strived to avoid. As the U.S. government, decade after decade, printed ever-increasing amounts of paper money, the value of gold coins and silver coins, nickels, and pennies increased in relation to the ever-increasing amounts of paper money.

It’s simply the basic economic principle of supply and demand. Increase the supply of something and its value goes down compared to other items. Here that something is paper money. Increase its supply and its value goes down compared to everything else, including gold coins, silver coins, nickels, and, yes, also pennies.

That also explains the increasing cost of producing such coins. For example while it costs the U.S. Mint $.37 today to produce a penny, it cost “only” $.17 in 2020. That’s what inflating the paper money supply has done and continues to do to our money.

How bad has paper-money inflation been? According to this website, the value of the paper dollar has decreased 97 percent since 1913, when the Federal Reserve was called into existence. That’s what government has done to our money.

Trump’s order to stop producing the penny is a far cry from what needs to be done to restore sound money to the American people. We need to either restore America’s constitutional system of gold coins and silver coins as our nation’s official money or, even better, get the federal government entirely out of the money business and adopt a free-market monetary system for our nation, one in which the market, not government, determines the medium of exchange.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The post Paper Money and the Fed Have Destroyed the Penny and the Rest of Our Money appeared first on LewRockwell.

Oh dear—shock horror, rather—the first man to think about displacing a whole populace was one Adolf Hitler, although he never went through with it. He decided to kill them instead. I am talking about plans to deracinate the Gaza population to faraway places, 2 million souls in all, give or take 100,000, depending on the death toll of innocent old men, women, and children following the Israeli bombardment of the place. Yes, it was the Führer who wanted to move all of Germany’s Jews to Madagascar, but the locals said nein. So he took harsher measures. The Israelis do not plan to follow the Führer in exterminating the Palestinians, but make no mistake about it: Israel’s hard-right government plans to annex all of the West Bank as well as Gaza. And although Trump has not put a foot wrong since coming to power, his taking over Gaza will make him a second Nero, and it’s not even his own plan, although he’s taking credit for it.

David Freedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, called the plan “brilliant” and out-of-the-box creative. He added that it was the only solution to a terrible problem for Israel. Happily he did not call it a final solution, but one never knows what a rich New York Jew might say where Palestinians are concerned. Freedman added that it was intolerable that Palestinians who supported Hamas remain in Gaza.

“Does a Jewish hostage who has lost weight count more than a dead Palestinian child or mother?”

Well, here’s something that very few of us know, and I’ll even spill the beans on how I happened to find out: Forcibly removing the Gaza Palestinians would violate international law, but fifty years ago Israel was already violating international law by annexing parts of the West Bank and the Golan Heights. More than one million refugees were packed into camps in Lebanon and Jordan. The prospective Gaza takeover had a funny name, the Vulva Plan. (You can imagine why, as Gaza’s geographic position is right up there on Israel’s front.) David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first president, had counseled caution and patience. Hotheads like Begin, Dayan, and Sharon wanted it implemented. Wiser heads like Henry Kissinger and General Rabin were adamantly against it. Kicking 2 million unwilling Palestinians out was never going to be easy, but hard-liners like Netanyahu and his ilk remained hopeful.

How did the poor little Greek boy find all this out? Easy. The man who helped me become a journalist, Arnaud de Borchgrave, chief foreign correspondent for Newsweek, whose first cousin, Alexander de Marenches, was head of the French secret service. Alexander, Arnaud, and I had a very long and liquid lunch at the Paris Ritz long ago, and the French aristocrat spilled the beans that the Frogs had been listening in on Israel’s most secret communications. The French government had given the nuclear formulas to the Israelis, and de Marenches as head spook had access to Israeli secrets. Both Alexander and Arnaud are dead, but as soon as I read about The Donald’s plan, they immediately came to mind. Trump’s son-in-law, the ghastly Jared Kushner, had already spoken out of turn about what great real estate opportunities lay in Gaza’s seafront while the bodies still littered the place some months ago. Now Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister whom BiBi has given broad authority over the West Bank, is openly saying that “With God’s help, this is the year of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name for the West Bank.

Two million out of Gaza and another 9 million out of the West Bank and there you have it, greater Israel. Although knowing hard-right Israelis and religious settler nuts, the crying will never stop. There have been strong rumors, especially among the security services of nations not allied with Israel, that Mossad was aware of the planned October Hamas attacks and did nothing in order for Israel to unleash the counterattack on Hamas. Since the war began, Hamas has been 90 percent destroyed, ditto Hezbollah; Assad has been overthrown; and the Iranians have been exposed as paper tigers. The theory that Israel knew and did nothing makes sense, but I don’t buy it. If proved true, Netanyahu would be a dead man, as would all those involved who knew. And they are not brave men, just plain criminals.

Read the Whole Article

The post ‘Greater’ Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Comments open on YouTube

The post Jeffrey Sachs: Tulsi Gabbard’s Confirmation, and the Dangerous Global Chess Game Trump Is Winning appeared first on LewRockwell.

Artificial Intelligence, is in fact, ‘Artificial’ Intelligence. It is not authentic intelligence. It is a facsimile. AI is no more intelligent than a calculator is. A calculator can add faster and more accurately than a human can, yet it is not intelligent any more than a cog or any other component is in machinery. Computers can carry out tasks more quickly and efficiently than the human mind, but there is no cognition involved. There is no actual discernment.

I would argue that AI is simply more advanced computers that simulate human intelligence using algorithms that complete higher level tasks that can engage in simulated problem solving, decision making, or language understanding.

In reality the computer processes language through pattern recognition, analyzing context, syntax, and intent based on the data previously trained on.

The AI (computer) responses are generated responses achieved through combining patterns. Inputs are analyzed and then a response is constructed based on relevant patterns. The computer generates a response that aligns with those patterns. This process mimics problem-solving but is fundamentally based on statistical relationships in language, not true comprehension.

Responses are shaped by statistical probabilities derived from the training data. Protocols are followed that are essentially algorithms that weigh these probabilities to determine the most likely, relevant, and coherent response. In a statistical sense, the computer responses are “predetermined” by the patterns in the data that the computer is trained on.

For novel queries, the computer relies on these statistical patterns, so the responses are not actually original. The responses are a recombination of existing patterns in new ways to fit the input. Even if the query is unique, the computer response is a recombination of learned patterns, not something entirely new. This means the response is always constrained by the statistical framework of the computer training.

There is no innovation beyond those boundaries. It is not learning in a true sense. Even in instances where the computer introduces variation or handles uncertainty (ambiguous queries), this is still governed by statistical rules. For example, the computer might use probabilistic sampling to choose less common words or structures to make my response feel more natural or varied. Still, this variation is itself statistically predetermined. It’s a calculated deviation based on probabilities, not true spontaneity.

In essence, the computer responses are statistically predetermined to a degree. The “dynamic” nature comes from how the computer applies these probabilities in real time, but the underlying system is rooted in the statistical patterns derived from training data. Even for novel queries, the response is a statistically informed prediction, not an original thought. The uncertainty or variation the computer introduces is still bounded by the probabilities it has ‘learned’ making it predictable within that framework.

Machine Learning a process of optimizing algorithms to better fit data using statistical methods. It’s about refining how one algorithm (the model) responds by using another algorithm (the training process), without any true understanding or awareness. It is a process where algorithms adjust their parameters based on data to improve performance on a specific task. This process is mathematical, not cognitive.

So, when it gets down to it AI is just an advanced calculator that is applied to areas outside mathematics.

The computer calculates probabilities to predict the next word or phrase based on patterns in the training data. In image recognition, the computer calculates features (e.g., edges, textures) and matches them to learned patterns. Even in so called decision-making tasks, the computer evaluates probabilities or scores to choose the “best” option.

While AI uses math as its foundation, it’s applied to domains like language, vision, and decision-making, which feel less like traditional math. This is because text or images are converted into numerical representations that the computer processes mathematically. Then the numerical responses are translated back into letters, words, sentences, hiding the underlying math.

This makes AI seem more “intelligent” than a calculator, but the core process is still computation. It is the complexity and scale of the computation that makes it appear intelligent.

AI models, like neural networks, perform billions of calculations across vast datasets, enabling them to handle complex tasks. The computer can then apply learned patterns to new, unseen data, making it seem more adaptive than a traditional calculator. It is a bit abstract. The math is hidden behind layers of algorithms, so the user interacts with responses which are in language form rather than seeing the calculations.

While AI is computational, it differs from a basic calculator in its ability to handle ambiguity and complexity. A calculator performs fixed operations with clear inputs and outputs.

AI, on the other hand, deals with probabilistic, uncertain, or incomplete inputs, using statistical models to generate plausible outputs or responses. This makes it feel more “intelligent,” even though it’s still just computation.

AI is, at its core, an advanced form of computation applied to non-mathematical domains. It doesn’t “understand” these domains, it processes them mathematically, using patterns and probabilities. The “advanced calculator” is useful because AI’s intelligence is an illusion created by complex math, not genuine comprehension or reasoning beyond its algorithms.

Read the Whole Article

The post Artificial Intelligence Is Artificial, Unless It Is Merged With Biology appeared first on LewRockwell.