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Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

Gold and Geopolitics

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John Leake

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Writes Dennis A.:

Greetings,

What you didn’t mention, although I don’t know the statistics,  was that it is easier to kill, murder many people at once with a single gun rather than trying to do so by hand of your husband, wife or children or members of a meeting. How much of that happens in the US?

In the UK guns can be available on the black market but they are rarely used. If many house holders had guns, as in the US, I suspect there would be many murders and random shootings. In the US police  stopping any car assumes, quite rightly, that there could be gun play. That doesn’t happen in the UK as people don’t have guns. Citizens having guns cannot stop any govt. force doing what they want.

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John Leake

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

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/le-leggi-dellue-sul-comparto-tecnologico)

Negli ultimi decenni l'Europa ha creato ben poco di realmente rilevante in termini di piattaforme tecnologiche, social network, sistemi operativi, o motori di ricerca. Al contrario, ha creato un ampio apparato normativo progettato per limitare e punire chi ha effettivamente innovato.

Invece di produrre alternative ai giganti tecnologici americani, l'UE ha scelto di soffocare quelle esistenti attraverso normative come il Digital Services Act (DSA) e il Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Il DSA mira a controllare i contenuti e il funzionamento interno delle piattaforme digitali, richiedendo la rapida rimozione dei contenuti ritenuti “inappropriati”, in quella che equivale a una forma moderna di censura, nonché la divulgazione del funzionamento degli algoritmi e restrizioni sulla pubblicità mirata. Il DMA, a sua volta, cerca di limitare il potere dei cosiddetti gatekeeper, costringendo aziende come Apple, Google, o Meta ad aprire i propri sistemi ai concorrenti, a evitare preferenze personali e a separare i flussi di dati tra i prodotti.

Queste due normative avranno un impatto maggiore sulle aziende tecnologiche statunitensi rispetto a qualsiasi legislazione nazionale, in quanto si tratta di norme emanate a Bruxelles ma applicate alle aziende americane in modo extraterritoriale. E vanno ben oltre le sanzioni: impongono modifiche strutturali alla progettazione di sistemi e funzionalità, qualcosa che nessuno stato dovrebbe imporre alle imprese private straniere.

Nell'aprile 2025 Meta è stata multata di €200 milioni ai sensi del Digital Markets Act per aver presumibilmente imposto un modello “consenso o pagamento” agli utenti europei di Facebook e Instagram, senza offrire una vera alternativa. Oltre alla multa è stata costretta a separare i flussi di dati tra le piattaforme, compromettendo così il sistema di pubblicità personalizzata che sostiene la sua redditività. Si è trattato di una palese interferenza nel suo modello di business.

Nello stesso mese Apple è stata multata di €500 milioni per aver impedito a piattaforme come Spotify di informare gli utenti su metodi di pagamento alternativi al di fuori dell'App store. L'azienda è stata costretta a rimuovere queste restrizioni, aprendo iOS ad App store esterni e sistemi di pagamento concorrenti. Ancora una volta, si è trattato di un'intrusione indesiderata e di un attacco diretto al modello basato sull'esclusività dell'ecosistema Apple.

Anche altre aziende come Amazon, Google, Microsoft e persino X sono sotto esame; quest'ultima è stata particolarmente colpita dalle norme DSA, essendo stata oggetto di un'indagine formale nel 2023 per presunta inosservanza delle norme sulla moderazione dei contenuti.

Le Big Tech, per loro stessa natura, rappresentano il bersaglio primario e mirato di questo nuovo quadro giuridico europeo. Queste aziende operano su scala globale, si basano su modelli di business incentrati sulla raccolta e la monetizzazione dei dati, integrano verticalmente più livelli dell'ecosistema digitale e detengono posizioni dominanti in settori chiave come i motori di ricerca, i social network e i sistemi operativi.

Con circa 450 milioni di consumatori e un elevato potere d'acquisto a livello digitale, l'UE è il secondo mercato più grande al mondo in tale settore. Per le Big Tech lasciare l'Europa non è un'opzione ed è proprio da qui che Bruxelles trae il suo potere: imponendo regole rigide, impone cambiamenti a livello globale, poiché mantenere diverse versioni di un prodotto per ogni regione è costoso e tecnicamente irrealizzabile. In questo modo, l'Unione Europea diventa di fatto un legislatore mondiale, esportando la sua visione normativa al resto del mondo.

Pur vivendo in realtà istituzionali diverse, europei e americani condividono valori fondamentali: libertà individuale, iniziativa privata e innovazione aperta. È in nome di questi valori che devono ora percorrere un percorso comune di resistenza a questa eccessiva regolamentazione, riaffermando un'alleanza transatlantica in difesa dell'innovazione, della sovranità digitale e della libertà stessa.

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

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As libertarians, we believe that people have the right of self-ownership and property. If we have these rights, it’s obvious that we have the right to defend these rights by using force against attempts to take them away from us. As the great Murray Rothbard says in The Ethics of Liberty: “If, as libertarians believe, every individual has the right to own his person and property, it then follows that he has the right to employ violence to defend himself against the violence of criminal aggressors.”

The Leftists who want to take away our guns claim that guns are dangerous: people often die in gun accidents, for example, and sometimes, people wrongly kill or seriously injure others because they are overcome by rage. The Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” but until the Supreme Court ruled in Heller and other cases that the amendment is an individual right, not just a right that is applicable only when people are serving in the militia, the Second Amendment wasn’t held to limit the right of states or localities to ban or to restrict gun usage by people. And Heller and the follow-up cases allow states considerable latitude to restrict guns, and Blue States have taken full advantage of this. Moreover, machine guns, and guns with silencers can still be banned, and the government can also forbid sales of guns to certain classes of people, e.g., those who have been convicted of a felony, Furthermore, victims are so hamstrung by provisions against “undue” force in self-defense that the criminal is automatically handed an enormous built-in advantage by the existing legal system.

But, as Rothbard notes with characteristic insight, guns are not by nature aggressive; only what people do with guns can qualify as aggression: “It should be clear that no physical object is in itself aggressive; any object, whether it be a gun, a knife, or a stick, can be used for aggression, for defense, or for numerous other purposes unconnected with crime. It makes no more sense to outlaw or restrict the purchase and ownership of guns than it does to outlaw the possession of knives, clubs, hatpins, or stones. And how are all of these objects to be outlawed, and if outlawed, how is the prohibition to be enforced? Instead of pursuing innocent people carrying or possessing various objects, then, the law should be concerned with combatting and apprehending real criminals.”

Also, what follows from the fact that people use violence to commit crimes of violence? The fake “gun control” advocates don’t mention that by far the greatest use of guns for violent crimes has been governments, not people acting in their private capacity. As the economist George Reisman has said: “Let me say immediately that I too believe in gun control. However, I do so in the light of the knowledge that by far the largest number and the most powerful guns and other weapons are in the possession of the government. First and foremost, of course, the federal government, which has atomic and hydrogen bombs, as well as ballistic missiles with which to deliver them, fleets of warships, and thousands upon thousands of tanks, planes, artillery pieces, machine guns, and lesser weapons. State and local governments also possess considerable weaponry, though less than the federal government. But just the revolvers, rifles, shot guns, clubs, tear gas, and tasers in their possession are capable of causing serious injury and death, and frequently do so.

“Moreover, the threat of deadly force is implicitly present in every law, regulation, ruling, or decree that emanates from any government office, at any level. The threat of such force is what compels obedience on the part of the citizens. Even such an innocuous offense as a parking violation is capable of resulting in death if a person persists in not paying the fine imposed and, when ultimately confronted with arrest, resists by physically defending himself.

“Literally everything the government does is ultimately a threat to point a gun at someone and use it if necessary. If this were not the case, the law, regulation, ruling, or whatever, would be without force or effect. People would be free to ignore it if they wished. Because of the government’s implicit threat to use deadly force to uphold its decisions, any meaningful program of gun control must above all focus on strictly controlling and regulating the activities of the government.

“The government possesses overwhelming power to respond to the use of force by common criminals. That is its basic domestic function. The very existence of laws against such crimes as murder, robbery, and rape serves as a control on the use of force, including the use of guns, by the potential perpetrators of such acts, because it constitutes a deterrent to them. The more efficient the government is in apprehending the perpetrators of such acts and the more certain is their appropriate punishment, the greater is the deterrent, and thus the more effective is the implicit gun control.

“Our entire Constitution and Bill of Rights are essential measures of gun control — this time, gun control directed against the government. For example, the First Amendment prohibits the government from using its guns to abridge the freedoms of speech or press. The Second Amendment prohibits the government from using its guns to abridge the freedom of the citizen to keep and bear arms. Indirectly, the Second Amendment also operates to limit the government’s use of its guns to abridge freedom in general. This is because, in our system of checks and balances, an armed citizenry constitutes a check on the possibility of the government becoming tyrannical and attempting to use its power to threaten the citizens’ lives and property. It should be understood as protecting a balance between the power remaining in the hands of the people and the power they have delegated to their government. Indeed, the language of the Second Amendment, ‘A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed’ should be understood in this way.

“The average American of today is intellectually so far removed from his forebears that instead of regarding government with apprehension, he is more likely to regard it as a virtual parent, concerned only with protecting and helping him. Evil, he believes, can come only from uncontrolled private individuals, notably greedy businessmen and capitalists and, now and then, psychopaths. And in these cases, of course, the solution is believed to be still more government power — power to tax, regulate, and control the businessmen and capitalists to the point of extinction and power ultimately to deprive private individuals of the right to own guns.

“It simply doesn’t occur to many people nowadays that government could be the source not only of massive economic ills but of human deaths on a scale dwarfing the deaths caused by the worst individual psychopaths. The number of murders attributable to governments around the world in the 20th century, including those resulting from government-caused famines in places such as the Ukraine and Communist China, is estimated to exceed 260 million. Of this total, Communist China is responsible for more than 76 million, the Soviet Union for almost 62 million, and Nazi Germany for almost 21 million.”

Let’s return to Murray Rothbard. People who want guns to be “controlled” are usually upper-class “liberals” who don’t have to worry very much about crime in their neighborhoods. These laws shackle members of vulnerable minority groups from protecting themselves: “Gun prohibition is the brainchild of white middle-class liberals who are oblivious to the situation of poor and minority people living in areas where the police have given up on crime control. Such liberals weren’t upset about marijuana laws, either, in the fifties when the busts were confined to the ghettos. Secure in well-policed suburbs or high-security apartments guarded by Pinkertons (whom no one proposes to disarm), the oblivious liberal derides gun ownership as ‘an anachronism from the Old West.’”

Let’s do everything we can to defend our right to keep and bear arms!

The post Why the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Is Fundamental appeared first on LewRockwell.

One year ago, Robert Kennedy, a left-leaning, life-long Democrat, gave the most important political speech of the decade. He put his pride aside, he put his own presidential campaign aside, and he said he would support Donald Trump as the 47th President. Kennedy is an alpha male. Trump is an alpha male. It was a shock for me to see Kennedy give the speech he did, because it meant that he would be tying his future to the, at times difficult-to-work-with, Donald Trump.

Would a long-term relationship between these two alpha males even be tenable? One year into that relationship, I believe they are a team positioned to still be impacting American policy one decade from now and perhaps far beyond that. I believe they will have a friendship and working relationship that will last through their lifetimes.

I could not clearly imagine that vision on the day in August 2024 that Kennedy gave that speech.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Donald Trump, and there are hundreds of reasons to like him. Even if you do not like him, he has given America a fighting chance again. In all corners of American life, the culture that I refer to as American culture has been given a fighting chance.

American culture is rooted in the Bible as its prime founding document and in the Declaration of Independence as its second most important, along with the Articles of Confederation (1781), the Constitution, early state constitutions, some notable books, some essays, and many letters.

There are conflicts contained within. The declaration of 1776 is written in a very different spirit than the constitution of 1789. An important court case is a founding document— Marbury v. Madison (1803), the court case that I dislike the most, for it is out of line with almost all other founding documents, out of line with the American experiment. It is as out of place as each effort to put central bank control over the money supply in America is out of place. There are, and have always been, prominent veins of freedom versus control in American culture, and where freedom has been allowed, it has largely been a success. Where control has won the battle, it has largely been a failure.

Subduing a free people has long been a goal of those who hate widespread human freedom on this planet.

It is amusing how many people are so triggered by Trump on the left. It is amusing how many people right of Trump consider him to be so flaccid on the issues that matter most.

Trump is a moderate in the Maga movement. For those left of Trump, that means when Trump fails to achieve success at correcting 80 years of neglect after only 3 or 4 years of reform, someone far more extreme than Trump is likely to follow. Those left of Trump, if they had a sound long-term vision, would do their best to support Trump and to release pressure from the American experiment. Unless the American system crumbles, then Trump’s massive success is the only way to avoid someone even more polarizing and extreme coming after him.

Again, Trump is a moderate in the Maga movement. For those to the right, that means constant disappointment from the moderate man when an extreme man is desired. One must not forget that Donald Trump was a long-time Democrat. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign positions were little different from Bill Clinton’s 1992, or even 1996, campaign positions. In two decades, the political climate changed so much in America that a left-of-center, moderate platform turned into a platform that many seemingly serious people with serious positions reference as Hitlerian in nature.

More than a shift in political position in America, this behavior is more importantly indicative of an erosion of culture, and an erosion of values, as well as an erosion in the belief that there are even such things as values and culture.

For all of his bravado, Trump, again, is a moderate in the Maga movement, and that means so much. He is not always going to make happy the vast and diverse audience to the right of him. He will enrage those to the left of him. He will, again, likely be succeeded by someone far more extreme than him. He is merely breaking ground in that Maga movement. Realistically, a century of neglect may require, two centuries of repair. It is bigger than one man.

And what is that Maga movement?

The Maga movement was shaped by numerous federal politicians and thinkers, among them Ron Paul, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan. Ron Paul, primary among that group, through his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, changed the trajectory of American politics and made it possible for Trump to run and win in 2016. Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign notably spread Austrian economics far and wide, gave birth to Bitcoin specifically and the cryptocurrency industry in general, and gave birth to the movement known as the Tea Party. Without Ron Paul and without Ron Paul 2008, there would be no Bitcoin, there would be no Tea Party, and there would be no Trump 2016.

As I write this, somewhere between the principled positions of Ron Paul and the relentless high-energy drive of Donald Trump is the definition of what the Maga movement is. That heart of the Maga movement may change over time, but at its roots are those two men, and the clash between their two very different ways. I do not pretend that Ron Paul is Donald Trump’s daily advisor. Ron Paul need not do that, for Ron Paul duplicated himself 17 years ago when he re-entered the national spotlight and gave campaign speeches night-after-night that sounded more like a wizened sage sharing a new challenge to his students rather than sounding like any campaign stump speech. Before the word “meme” meant anything to most people, Ron Paul circulated viral ideas and asked hard questions in a display of memetic aptitude that continues to infect and affect the entire American and global political spectrum.

That heart of the Maga movement may change over time, but at its roots are those two men, and the clash between their two very different ways — though in many ways there are similarities as well. Yes, similarities between the obstetrician Dr. Paul and the real estate developer Mr. Trump.

Those who know the Trump family, know that there has been a vaccine injury in the family. It made sense, then, in 2016 why Donald Trump invited Robert Kennedy to Trump Tower in New York City and tapped Kennedy to lead a vaccine safety commission in the new administration. And it was with great sadness that I watched Donald Trump pull the plug on that commission.

Neither of them have ever provided an explanation that satisfied me as to why that collaboration ended.

There could be no draining of the swamp without addressing that important issue of medical tyranny in our lives. Before his term was out, under Trump’s watch, the greatest single example of global medical tyranny had occurred beginning on or around the Ides of March 2020, and arguably extending to this present day. Had Kennedy held a position of trusted advisor to him, 2020 might have looked different.

I cannot imagine how difficult it was for Kennedy to have gotten over the hurdle that Trump again would not have his back. But in August 2024, when the world, I believe, looked different than it does today, Kennedy stopped his campaign and began to campaign in a full-throated and passionate way for Trump, with the hope that he would be placed in a role to implement his Maha vision for America.

Down to the very end of the confirmation process, I knew that Trump could again simply drop Kennedy. But that did not happen.

And no matter what anyone ever says about Elon Musk, I will forever be grateful that he was the target who took so much heat from the media, from politicians, and from the public for the first one hundred days or so of the administration, which allowed for Kennedy and others to not be the daily target. If Elon Musk were not daily headline news with the Department of Government Efficiency, then I do not believe we would have seen Robert Kennedy confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy would have been the one taking heat.

Of all the good that Trump has done (and out of the bad things too), if allowed to play out, the single most important impact of Trump’s presidency to date will be the Robert Kennedy nomination to Secretary of HHS.

I am not a single issue voter. I do not lightly turn against anyone. I have a great deal of loyalty and patience. My values are sacrosanct to me, and I know that no politician will ever meet my criteria 100% of the time, since that is simply not how politics works.

When I speak to people or observe those born approximately 1975 or earlier, I notice something — I notice a connectedness with others. When I speak to people born approximately 1980 or later, or observe them, I notice that lack of connectedness. The five years between are a gray area. I can almost always tell, by personality, what side of that divide a person is on. Something fundamental changed in the lives of American children at that time. And while I don’t know for certain what it is, I have a hunch what some of the culprits may be. The change in vaccine formulas and the change in vaccine frequency and timing are the culprits highest on my list.

Kennedy has spent the last two decades of his life being shunned by family, respectable society, the media, his party, and the public. That is because he has focussed primarily on the question of, “What is happening to the brains of American children?”

Something is very wrong. Autism, as one example, once a 1 in 10,000 child concern in 1970, has become a concern of some 1 in 31 children and perhaps as many as 1 in 12.5 boys, as Kennedy pointed out in the August 26, 2025 Cabinet Meeting.

One of the culprits he has pointed to are vaccines. But it need not stop there. There may be other culprits. And unfortunately for America, government has been so complicit in silencing him. Social media companies and search engines and many other industries have been so cooperative with government in silencing him. Media and entertainment have been so obedient to big pharma in silencing him and marginalizing anyone with his concerns.

I would love to see Kennedy continue to do his work outside of government, because I think government is a place for the second-rate so often and not worth the time of someone of Kennedy’s caliber. However, 2020 has reminded us that government is so large that if we do not tend to that leviathan, it will destroy so much of the life of so many of us and at a whim.

The August 2025 Cabinet Meeting showed me something important, as did the announcements that were timed alongside it: America has reached “peak vaccine.”

Last year, children had the Covid shot forced on them, likely to never happen again. Before the year is out, there will almost certainly be a national reduction in the required number of childhood vaccines to attend school. Florida this week, on September 3, 2025, became the first state to remove some mandates as their state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo made history by ending the following vaccine mandates, which are in his power to do without an act of the state legislature: chickenpox, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), hepatitis B, and pneumococcal disease.

Florida statutes currently require school children to get immunized against seven illnesses: polio, diphtheria, measles, whooping cough, mumps and tetanus. These remain in place and can only be removed by an act of the legislature.

If Kennedy’s work is allowed to play out, America will have reached peak vaccine.

This three generation period we have lived through will one day soon be looked at with as much disbelief as the period of the lobotomy, and with far greater horror.

That we have reached peak vaccine may not mean much to you. I know there are many it does not mean much to. They note the purported side effects of vaccines and say to themselves and others, “It will never happen to us, so why not just comply?” I hope this never happens to you, but until you have held a little baby in your arms, totally healthy until that day, having seizure-after-seizure after being given her first vaccines that morning, then maybe you won’t believe the reality of the purported side effects. Maybe you won’t, until then, feel touched by the work Kennedy is doing.

I do feel touched by it.

Every time that I speak to someone born after 1980, I feel touched by it. I can see the disconnect. Something very bad happened in America. And few will talk about it, let alone take it seriously. Three generations have had extensive neurological harm done to them in large numbers through some cause, and I am very sensitive to how prevalent that is.

Kennedy was a target before, but he is more of a target now as his first year of collaboration with Donald Trump begins to bear fruit. Generations of parents and doctors and other experts are soon to look like the most vile kind of mass murderers for dispensing advice that has killed and maimed widely across at least three generations.

Kennedy is not just talking about it, but is doing something about it. He is redirecting funding to the research that will point to what the problems may be. He is amassing the hidden data that no one has ever been shown.

This will make him many times more the assassination target than he was before. This will make him many times more the subject of attack than he was before.

Now your job must be to do something about it.

I write asking you to talk constantly with others about this topic, to share your experiences, to watch his work, and to share it, to share it everywhere you can, with whatever audience you have, whether your audience in size and the reach of your influence be 10 people in size or 10 million people in size. Each one of us has been given reach.

The White House can accomplish some neat things. But I am a believer in freedom, so I recognize the most important of those things done by the White House are the ways they shape culture — not through grand social engineering projects, but through the leadership from that bully pulpit. A good leader can encourage so many without spending a penny and without enacting a new regulation.

I ask you to pay special attention to Kennedy’s vaccine work and neurological work and to make yourself a defender of that work, a supporter of that work, and one of the circulators of that work.

America’s brightest days are ahead. Our individual efforts in our own lives are able to make that statement a reality.

The post RFK Needs Your Help and America Needs Your Help appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Putz —A jerk, or a self-made fool, but this word literally means penis.”

One of Claude Monet’s most famous paintings is called Impressionism, Sunrise (1872), depicting the port of Le Harve. Perhaps it is enigmatic to declare that this painting reminds me of the US Congress. I will explain. The lines between water, land, sky, people and boats are all blurred. There is very little to distinguish the various blobs. Only the sun rising above the horizon is clearly visible and is distinguished by its unique color.  Consider Congress, a gray blob of indistinguishable crooks and imbeciles, all bought and paid for by innumerable interests, foreign and domestic. Watch this performance by senators screeching at testimony of Robert Kennedy for a small sample of the torrent of bilge that comes from that body. The one beam of intelligence, clarity, and simple honesty I ever hear from Congress is from the representative from Kentucky’s 4th district Thomas Massie.

With this in mind, consider the actions of President Donald Trump. To all of the backstabbers in his own Republican party, and even to many Democrats, he acts like they are his pal. Perhaps the worst case is his support of Senator Lindsey Graham, the dumbest and most destructive, who will wreck Trump’s presidency on the way to world war. But the one guy he goes after, the target of personal attacks, is the one and only Thomas Massie. The fact Massie actually supports the true (as opposed to political maneuvers) America First agenda does not seem to be understood by the president. The one thing that Trump could actually accomplish to make the US and the world at large a better place is to root out the neoconservative war mongers from the Republican party and national discourse. That would be the greatest investment of his political capital. Yet he singles out Massie. (see Massie’s response here)

With Trump one is always guessing whether he is an idiot or playing 4D chess. His actions against Massie answer the question. The word to describe the man of such contradictions comes from somewhere in the recesses of my brain, tapping into my Jewish, Eastern European heritage, was putz. I never recall thinking of, let alone using that word before; yet that is what I now think of Trump.

Postscript

This little rant should not be taken as an implicit critique of the also excellent Senator Rand Paul.

The post Donald Trump Is a Putz! appeared first on LewRockwell.

The idea the world would be better served with a single “World Currency” has been growing and looms as a real possibility in the near future. Many people see this as a major part of the “endgame” or something that will constitute a needed reset to a global economy and financial system that has gone off track. Throughout history, before an economic collapse, the masses and society tend to believe things are financially stable. Only after the economy goes over the edge of an abyss and is in free-fall does reality set in. It is not by accident that blinders have been placed upon us but it is the result of distractions being thrown in our path by those wishing to hold onto their power over us. It is wise to remember that when things do become critical, those in power will not be kind to us but that we will be thrown under the bus without a thought.

Over the last one hundred years, equity markets have been a primary tool used by the public to measure the economy. In some ways, the stock markets have become a kind of switch the elites can push at any given time to energize the masses distracting them from the dangers lurking in their economic future. When markets rise despite warnings from negative fiscal indicators, the masses become optimistic. During every upswing of stocks the elites claim they see the “green shoots” of prosperity, however, these shoots seem to always turn brown and die. We have been leaping from one recession to another even though central banks claim they now hold the key to generating true and honest growth. The truth is the current stock market bolstered by easy money and stock buybacks is a poor reflection of the real economy and what is happening in many areas across a broad swath of the world.

History indicates that establishment economists trained and educated in the ivory towers of academia are perhaps the most useless of all analysts and perpetually wrong. Only independent analysts have ever been able to predict anything of value when it comes to our economic future and that is because they have the advantage of not being blinded by the propaganda and brainwashed by lies flowing from those in control. Time and time again it has been proven the appearance of prosperity means nothing if the fundamentals do not support the optimism. A bullish stock market, a high dollar index, and low unemployment mean nothing and are unsustainable if generated by false methods and fiat money. We have seen time and time again throughout history that fundamentals matter.

The markets cannot hide from true price discovery forever. The stock market with its boom and bust cycles has proven to be a false indicator of what is really unfolding. Manipulation by the central banks has rendered this indicator of economic health useless. The problem we face is the horrible options in fiat money, massive debt, and the growth of international businesses have all come together in an explosive way. The banking elites are positioning themselves to avoid blame for this disaster while the rest of us are being sold on the most elaborate recovery con-game ever conceived and perpetuated by those with the most to gain.

Those in charge of our financial machinery have indicated to the public their desire for more power. This means creating a truly global centralized economic system and a highly controlled world currency framework dominated by a select cult of banking oligarchs. This would, in effect makes the rest of the human race their slaves.

Over the years, many articles have  referred to a 1988 write-up in the financial magazine ‘The Economist’ titled “Get ready for a world currency by 2018.” It outlined the framework for a global currency system administered by the International Monetary Fund. This new system was and is floated on the premise that only by erasing all national economic sovereignty can true stability be obtained. It requires governments to borrow from the world central banking authority, rather than printing currency to finance their infrastructure programs.

This dovetails with efforts to create such a system under the total control of the IMF which should raise the concern of every American. We are hearing more warnings and witnessing a push to destabilize the dollar as the reserve currency by China and several other countries. It is also occurring as Orwellian governments float the idea of going cashless as a way to gain further control over our lives.

For years the IMF has been openly discussing the ascension of the SDR to replace the dollar as the world reserve currency. Many developing nations that are deep in debt are already asking for help from the IMF due to volatility across the world and the BRICS are pushing hard to remove the dollar as the world reserve. This makes it a question of when such a currency reset will occur and in its wake bury the majority of the middle-class and poor throughout America. There is no way around it, the elites are positioned and merely waiting for a geopolitical disaster or catastrophe so overwhelming that when the time arrives they can portray themselves as our saviors during the chaos.

The demise of the dollar harkens back to when President Nixon severed its tie to gold. First, it’s crucial to understand that at the very core of our global economy is a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar which has been deemed the reserve currency.  The USD is unique in that it grants the U.S. the privilege of having a national currency which at the same time serves as the global reserve currency. This was solidified toward the end of World War II with the Bretton Woods agreement, which was accepted because the U.S. agreed to offer sovereign nations holding dollars a right to exchange these dollars for gold at a fixed price, however, with Nixon’s action in 1971, the USD became a fiat currency backed by nothing, the supply of which can be arbitrarily altered and manipulated by a group of unelected bureaucrats in charge of the Federal Reserve. This money system represents the most powerful tool on the planet.

The new world order and globalization pushed by many world leaders and the rich elite that tout “larger, more cooperative governments under one financial unit will benefit us all” feeds into the world currency scenario. Many Americans are oblivious to the fact we gain a great deal by our status of the dollar being the reserve currency by which all others tend to be measured. This means we have a great deal to lose if it is dethroned and stand to suffer the most if the dollar declines in value. Those who will be crucified are the middle-class Americans whose wealth islocked into or are holding long-term USD bonds thinking they are a safe investment.

Currently, a huge mismatch exists between the useof the dollar in the global financial system and the U.S. share of the world economy.This is whyChina, Russia, and several other countries that are acutely aware of this have been taking major steps to transition to a more multi-polar currency world. This is also why we should prepare and expect that in coming yearsthe world will adopt a completely different global financial system from the one chaotically birthed in the 1970s and when this occurs the USD will lose its total dominance on the world stage, resulting in major implications for America. While many people see this coming, several opinions exist as to how it will unfold and while we engage in speculation, nobody really knows what the world financial system will look like ten or twenty years down the road.

Few of us who continue to cherish freedom can get excited about transitioning away from the USD and being placed under the thumb of the IMF or an oppressive nation-state currency controlled by a country like China. That is why many of us think the dollar will be ripped from us during a time of crisis when Americans are open to accepting any solution offered to them as a way to ease their woes. While people point to cryptocurrencies as an option we should remember politics plays a massive role in how this all unfolds. To Americans, the fate of dollar-dominated assets and their value when the dust finally settles should be a huge concern but most Americans fail to grasp the implications. 

It is my contention the transition to a world currency will take a far greater toll on paper assets than tangible goods. While recognizing the flaws of the dollar and our current system I have come to believe the other fiat currencies such as the euro and yen hold even less merit. This includes cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Regardless, in the end, we should expect to be told and not given an option as to what is coming. If events unfold in the way those promoting a one-world currency have planned it will be a dagger in the heart of freedom.

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It was the senseless wicked shooting at the Minneapolis church the other day that finally made me decide that mental illness had become such a malevolent and pernicious evil  in American society that vast new unprecedented measures had to be taken at once to build up a mental health system as pervasive and powerful as the one for physical health.

Mental illness lies behind school  shootings, domestic violence,  opioid addictions, homeless camps, most suicides (especially among youths), Covid-triggered depression, and a host of other crimes and crises.  Self-help books, heavily weighed to individual mental problems and solutions, are the largest selling books in America and one of them with a vulgar title has been on the list for 300 weeks and counting. The Mental Health Association estimates a quarter of all adults—that’s some 64 million people–experiences a mental illness episode each year and a fifth of all youths have an episode of major depression yearly.  Those figures, however, represent only those instances reported to police or medical authorities and certainly undercount by thousands.

Given such an obvious crisis, one might imagine that a rational society would respond with serious medical assistance and treatment.  In fact, however, American treatment of mental illness has decreased over the past half-century as mental hospitals  have all but disappeared.  Starting in the 1950’s, when a variety of psychotropic drugs first appeared, public policy began the movement away from institutional care, with its Snakepit sorts of mistreatments and repressions, and toward what was called “community” health centers, with local care-givers and a variety of drugs.  This was made official with a Community Mental Health Act in 1963, and by the 1980s the U.S. had eliminated almost all mental hospitals and turned the mentally ill over to the hands of smaller clinics with voluntary participation by their charges.

The experiment has long proved itself a failure.  The mentally troubled did not show up at  the clinics, or showed but ignored psychiatric advice, or showed only for the drugs, often misused.  Those who committed crimes might be sent to prisons where there was some psychiatric care, but the penal system readily admitted that it was not in a fit position  to handle more than a handful of the ill and then only with hit-or-miss drugs.  Reports of mental sickness increased every year, until by now it is a standard and regrettably common explanation for incidents on every newscast.

There are 6,146 hospitals for physical illness in the U.S. and 1.1 million doctors.  There are 1,841 psychiatric hospitals for mental illness and just over 200,000 psychologists and psychiatrists.  It’s high time as a society we got over all our doubts and suspicions about mental illness and admitted that we have a problem and ought to redress that imbalance.

I do not think psychiatry has distinguished itself much as a successful health profession, and I regard with disdain its heavy reliance on drugs to take care of mental disturbances.  But it is a recognized profession and could certainly improve with additional attention and patronage, plus additional citizen involvement, and it is all we have as an immediate solution to our crisis. Given the support of well-funded institutions with supportive staffs—something like the asylums of the past, but avoiding their mistakes and excesses—it could expand its reach and effectiveness and make mental health treatment a common solution to our present crisis.

It is madness to do otherwise.

The post Bring Back Asylums appeared first on LewRockwell.

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” –Philip K. Dick

“Oregon discovered that Harley, a drug sniffing pot-bellied pig, was very effective both at finding drugs and at getting school children to pay attention to anti-drug messages. But when they tried to get funds from a federal program to train drug sniffing dogs to train other pigs and share their success, the bureaucrats decided the program was to train dogs and not pigs. I settled the problem by declaring Harley a dog.” –Al Gore address to Democratic Leadership Council on GOVERNMENT REFORM

“You live in a prison of words created by soft handed people whose only resource is the twisting of logic. Words are cast by spelling and statutory meanings and rules are all just words. That is the basis of your enslavement. Get clarification; legalese is the language of slavery.” —Mika Rasila

”The map is not the territory.” [The word is not the thing it symbolizes.]” –seminal semanticist Alfred A. Korzybski

“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” –legendary physicist Richard Feynman

“We didn’t see that you had to name everything to make it exist, and that the name you gave something made it what it was.” –Lakota elder Dan, Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog, New World Library, 2002 p. 165

“I was working for The Times [of London] in 1980, and just south of Kabul I picked up a very disturbing story. A group of religious mujahedin fighters had attacked a school because the communist regime had forced girls to be educated alongside boys. So they had bombed the school, murdered the head teacher’s wife and cut off her husband’s head. It was all true. …the [British] Foreign Office complained to the foreign desk that my report gave support to the Russians. [Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban guerrillas were fighting the Russians] …Because Osama bin Laden was [at that time] a good guy, Charles Douglas-Home, then editor of The Times would always insist that Afghan guerrillas were called ‘freedom fighters’ in the headline. There was nothing you couldn’t do with words.” –Robert Fisk: How can the US bomb this tragic people?

Once you’ve named something, Western language habits mean you begin to perceive it as the word you’ve named it rather than what it really is. Since words — including “names” — are by their nature abstract, your now word-defined-and-limited perception becomes static and seriously less complete than the complex dynamic scientifically implied sub-atomic “continuum of events” which is, as Bertrand Russell put it “theoretically more fundamental.” You hope the already existing and evolving differences between the abstract and static word — compared to the dynamic changing reality — don’t matter yet.

Next consider those names and labels that refer to things even more insubstantial than those physical “bodies” you’ve named and come to believe in which, Russell suggests, are “mere constructions.” That is, consider those even more insubstantial things that exist only as concepts, ideas AND WORDS in your mind and nowhere else. At the top of the list of those “even more insubstantial things” are “opinions,” “assumptions,” and most useful but dangerous and insidious of all, “predictions” and other less conscious anticipations of the future. It’s those insubstantial things that you spend most of your time thinking and talking about. –L. Reichard White, June 22, 2014

“The white world puts all the power at the top, Nerburn. … When your people first came to our land they were trying to get away from those people at the top. But they still thought the same, and soon there were new people at the top in the new country. It is just the way you were taught to think.”

“In your churches there is someone at the top. In your schools, too. In your government. In your business. There is always someone at the top and that person has the right to say whether you are good or bad. They own you.

“When you came among us, you couldn’t understand our way. You wanted to find the person at the top. … Your world was made of cages and you thought ours was, too. Even though you hated your cages you believed in them. …

“Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn’t look out, they would make us live in a world of cages, too.” –Lakota elder Dan, Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf nor Dog, New World Library, 2002, pg.157

The post Semantics vs. Slavery appeared first on LewRockwell.

Most of the preppers were thinking they finally are getting a leg up on being ready for the imminent concerns with our dangerously fragile economy, and everything else. But the incredibly grim news is that all the preparation will mean nothing if the government does not allow you to reap the benefits of all your hard work and sacrifice.

The beginning of the end of one of our most precious liberties–the right to our physical privacy, and all that goes with it–is set to go into effect throughout the country this summer, depending upon the responsive cooperation of various state participation efforts.

It is the full scale implementation of the “REAL I.D. ACT”, which stands for “National Identification and Location Registration Card.”

The bitterly sad thing is that almost nobody seems to care about this monumental infringement upon our freedoms. And the reality is that this is no longer a ’conspiracy theory’ for some future totalitarian scenario, but it is here now! Few even know what I’m talking about anymore at this point. Be honest with yourself: how many of you reading this now were even aware of this?

Some of you might recall something in past news about this ‘National I.D Card’ nonsense being brought up by obsessed agenda motivated supporters of the Patriot Act, and nobody in their right mind was for it, so it all had to get shot down, right?

Wrong. We, the People, must have missed the shot. Or maybe ”the target” had camouflage and was moving too fast below radar, and there was a deliberate intention to obfuscate the effort and ‘slip’ it through the back door of their totalitarian agenda.

Where Did It Come From?

The ’REAL I.D.ACT’ came out of the Patriot Act and all renewed or newly issued drivers licenses since 2005 required the applicants to show proof of residence (lease, utility bills, etc.) along with other personal private information.

Why would they really need all that just to know that you are a competent and safe driver? Even a more important question is why do they have to know everything about you and everything you do but there’s no transparency when it comes to ‘government activities?

A lot of ‘bad’ laws are always conveniently slipped into relatively ambiguous bills when nobody was really looking or even reading it before they voted on it. So how would most of the population know the dirty details of what the government is really doing behind our backs? They even mock us with tongue in cheek insults like Nancy Pelosi does by saying things like ”first we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it”!

Essentially the ‘powers that be’ want no private citizen in this great land of the free to have the right to be alone where nobody, including the government, can find them and bother them, even if they don’t want to be disturbed! It’s absolutely imperative for an agenda based government to know everything you do, and everything you ‘might’ do in the future!

{adinserter bph}Congress passed the ’REAL I.D.ACT’ in 2005 apparently, with nary a hoot nor a holler by anybody over the  quiet, whisper-death of another private part of our lives. And many would be surprised how many so called liberty minded Republicans also voted for it.

It means that eventually every citizen will be mandated and required to have a national I.D. card to go about their daily business in society which states their real identity AND–even more importantly–their real time actual place of residence. You know, that supposedly private place where you go to lay down your tired bones and privately harbor your good stuff to keep it safe from intrusion.

Additionally your new I.D. photo picture will go into a face recognition data base. This is so they can immediately know who they are looking at when you are shopping at Walmart or taking your dog for a walk.

Your ’REAL I.D.’ will usually be your driver’s license, but if you don’t drive, this will default to a registered ‘State photo I.D.’ card. So there’s no way to avoid it unless you drop out of society completely and live isolated somewhere under a rock or something and just don’t do anything much in life anymore.

Ostensibly, the blatantly specious notion posing as the ‘public safety’ rationale for this mass destruction of our privacy was supposedly to restrict so called potential sleeper terrorists from gaining access to flights and sensitive government property. What amazes me to no end is how stupidly gullible the government must think we are with this justification. But apparently they must be correct. After all, they DID get away with it.

There were at least two congressional hearings over the past few years which determined that the Patriot Act’s mass blanket NSA spying and other fiat violations of the Constitution actually, in pragmatic reality,  did virtually NOTHING to prevent further terrorist acts or enhance public safety!

But The FBI director was all over the media with the obligatory ‘false flag’ announcement that supposedly there are at least a hundred ISIS sleeper cells ready to ‘explode’ in America  after an unverifiable social media announcement apparently by an ISIS soldier announced it. How convenient, especially since the FBI director’s purpose for the media exposure was to promote the continuation of NSA spying on all of us– in the wake of the recent higher court ruling that it violated the 4/A– for the purpose of tracking these jihadists.

Guess what?  The next day there was another media announcement that all the computers and cell phones the NSA was monitoring that supposedly belonged to ISIS related jihadists suddenly disappeared off the radar, or in Spy-speak, they went dark and invisible. So much for ANY justification or mendacious excuse for mass spying on the privacy of the people.

Why Do We Need Real I.D.Act?

All military or security sensitive government agencies already have plenty of security and steps in place and even their own I’D’ credentials to get access to sensitive or restricted locations.

I already have to show an official DOD I.D. if I want in/on certain areas of a military base of government building. They don’t need or even care to see my state driver’s license. That’s always been a standard operating procedure of basic common sense national security. For more sensitive security access you submit to a retinal scan after you’ve been thoroughly vetted.

So a potential ISIS terrorist has about as much chance being a threat accessing important  sensitive areas as an elephant has squeezing into a Sardine Can. So the government is just lying about that!

Airline flights are already screened to a point of virtual 14th century violation of your body parts with the same humiliating body cavity strip search they give to criminals entering prison. They can’t do anything more unless they put you in a straightjacket and lock you in a dog transport cage for the duration of the flight and don’t let you out until you’re off the plane!

So why do you need a Real I.D to fly anywhere?  This country is supposed to have unrestricted freedom of movement in the public venue. What’s next, signing in to your personal vehicle so the government can log where you’re driving to? We’re already pretty close to that with ‘License Plate Scanners’ being the current ‘rage’ among thieving municipalities. But that’s another big fat one.

Why would the government need to have the unrestricted authority to know exactly where to find and access any and all private citizens who are merely minding their own business, just to keep potential terrorists from doing their terrorist acts?

This is America, not a Euro-Socialist FEMA Camp or a country where even the cops aren’t allowed to have firearms, so the jumping jihad psychos can stand in the street waving their AK’s and gloating over their murderous act while the police back up and run.

Unlike elsewhere in the world, in America–despite some cops cause a lot of consternation for citizens and other cops–most of the Police understand that their primary mission is to help and protect the citizenry and can definitely rise to the capability to handle any amount of weapon wielding terrorists decisively and quickly. They did it so admirably at the art center in Texas when a 60 year old experienced cop very expertly took out the terrorists in a high speed shoot out. And under such emergencies many civilians–also well-armed–would also assist the Police if needed.

So why anyone in government would try to justify a National KGB style approach for a problem that simply doesn’t exist? And if it did, we already can handle it quite cost effectively with normal Police and public awareness practices.

Do they mean to insult us all by saying that you couldn’t prevent psychotic terrorists from entering a public defense building or flying on an airline without violating the 4th Amendment guaranteed sacrosanct privacy of the American free citizens?

Or might it be really just so they can come visit anyone unannounced anytime you want, to add even more abuse to the 20,000 or so annual SWAT raids on private homes every year.

And I’ll bet that most of you didn’t know that the police check the purchase ‘registration’ records of the BATF before the raids to see if you are a law abiding citizen who buys their firearms on the ATF form 4473. This is done so that they could more easily obtain a ‘No Knock’ warrant from the judge so they can bust in on you fast before you can defend yourself from the home invasion. Well, that’s not a misprint, check it out.

Didn’t the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 make federal government registration of private guns illegal? Yes, it did, but the FOPA act had a ‘loophole’ with  a reverse okey-dokey on the people in the form of not precluding the police from inquiring into the history and location of a firearm during the course of an official investigation. Essentially it is definitely still, a below radar registration system if you need any form of information to be recorded in any manner, such as a background check and form 4473, if anybody at all can use that info to learn the location of the firearm.

And that, my friends, gets us closer to the absolute truth of what is really happening here. There is no justification for a National I.D. Registration… except for one.

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The post Avoiding the Privacy Apocalypse appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), who was praised by Pope John Paul II for establishing “a fruitful relationship between philosophy and the word of God” and who, in his epic work Russia and the Universal Church displayed an unequivocal profession of faith in the Catholic doctrine of the Roman primacy, said:

Christianity, if we really accept it as an absolute truth, must be put into practice in all affairs and relationships of life. There cannot be two supreme principles of life. This is the religious and moral axiom: one cannot serve two masters. 

Indeed, the serving of “two masters” stems in part from the fact that we as human beings cannot come to terms on the “supreme [or first] principle”: God as the ultimate source of all existence and truth, who, by His divine revelation, shows us how to know and live according to His moral precepts.

It is one thing for ambiguity to exist in our secularized society, which is indifferent at best, and where relativism, proportionality, and consequentialism have become the norm, or in ecclesiastical communities like the Lutherans or Christian fundamentalists who may be publicly against abortion but support in vitro fertilization. It is, however, something else when such opaqueness happens within our own Catholic Church where the teachings of our Savior Jesus Christ have been clear and constant for two thousand years. We see this, for example, with the German Catholic hierarchy, which remains divided over same-sex blessing guidelines as called for by Pope Francis’ proclamation Fiducia Supplicans.

Much has already been said on media platforms about the audience the dissident and pro-LGBTQ+ priest Fr. James Martin, S.J., had with Pope Leo XIV this past Monday. Less was said when, a few days prior, the pope quietly received Sr. Lucía Caram, the Argentine Dominican nun best known for her public approval of homosexual “marriage.”

“I would be in favour of homosexuals getting married in the Church because God always blesses love,” said Sr. Lucía. Asked if she would recommend homosexual couples act on their vice, she shrugged: “If they love each other… What do you want me to tell you!”

What is disheartening about all this is that such meetings communicate, as Fr. Martin posted on  after his audience, “the same message…from Pope Francis on LGBTQ people, which is one of openness and welcome,” without underlining the gravity of the sin and, subsequently, denying such individuals the fullness of participating in God’s covenant.

The justification to all this, as the Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna and President of the Italian Episcopal Conference Matteo Maria Zuppi recently said in citing Pope Francis, is the same old politically correct narrative:

“[W]e no longer oppose the world, and the world enters into us,” Zuppi stated.

The rules exist and must be respected. But by integrating, that is, by making people feel at home, not tolerated or condemned. Those who seem foreign enter because they are actually. His children and our brothers. And how do we learn what have been called non-negotiable principles? By being inside, living with others. We must be God’s house, not a hotel, as our parents would have said, at least mine. We must all learn to live at home, to think in relation to the Lord and to others.

Of course, no one is going to deny that the Church is for everyone and is open to everybody, just like we cannot limit how God grants His forgiveness, which is everlasting. And we should make people feel at home, just as our Lord did with sinners. However, that does not mean that the Church has an open door policy where, for example, the sacraments, which are necessary for our salvation, become optional or not even necessary. That would be presuming God’s mercy, as Protestants erroneously do. They claim all they have to do is accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior and they are saved— that is, that they will go immediately to Heaven after death.

In fact, because as Catholics we have entered into a covenant with God when we received the sacrament of Baptism and reasserted it with the sacrament of Confirmation, we are bound to make frequent use of the sacraments if we want any hope of being saved. And, when we need to be corrected, we then need to be corrected!

Heaven forbid I judge the pontiff on his meetings with Fr. Martin and Sr. Lucía, especially since what was discussed has not been made public. Yet, what conclusion are we as Catholics supposed to draw when the head of our Church meets with religious who publicly deny Church tenets and the Vatican Press Office says nothing thereafter? Based on what Cardinal Zuppi stated, one can conclude that in lieu of the Gospel message, the Masonic principle of human fraternity prevails as the supreme principle.

There may be those who say that this “supreme or first principle” is limited to religion and thus cannot be expected from someone who is not Catholic, for we all, as human beings, have our own opinions. Yet, Church teaching is not subjective, and thus one cannot claim to be ignorant of the universal concept of truth since it is dictated by the natural law, which, as stipulated by Cicero in his oration “For Titus Annius Milo”:

… [is] a law…not written, but born with us, which we have not learnt, or received by tradition, or read, but which we have taken and sucked in and imbibed from nature herself; a law which we were not taught, but to which we were made, which we were not trained in, but which is ingrained in us…

This is an innate part of our own humanity since we were created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27). A salient example of this is seen when Cain killed his brother Abel. While God had not yet given the Decalogue to man, in this case the Commandment “Thou shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13), Cain instantly knew after he murdered his brother that he committed a grave sin. God admonished him, but He also did not abandon him (cf. Genesis 4).

If the Vatican Press Office were to release a statement like, “The pope met with…and confirmed Church teaching on the matter,” then I guess we could breathe a sigh of relief. For then we could, more or less, be assured that the “first principle” had been confirmed.

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

The post On Applying the First Principle appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Democrats are so partisan now and so eager to criticize President Trump on anything he does that they are even attacking him for entering into peace negotiations with Vladimir Putin.

They are so desperate that they are even attacking him on things they used to favor, such as being tough on trade and trying to bring more jobs back to the U.S.

The war between Russia and Ukraine never would have happened and could have easily been avoided if we had stuck by previous commitments by President Trump during his first term and by Secretary of State James Baker in 2012 not to expand NATO into Ukraine.

These broken promises have been made worse by our eagerness to impose sanctions on Russia, and actions by so-called Neocons who have been in power and active in both Democratic and Republican administrations for the last 40 or more years.

For instance, AI says the U.S. “actively engaged in efforts to influence Ukraine’s political landscape, which ultimately contributed to the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych,” who had been popularly elected.

The AI report added: “The U.S., particularly through figures like Victoria Nuland, openly expressed support for the Euromaidan protests, which aimed to push Yanukovych towards closer ties with the EU (European Union) and away from Russia.”

U.S. taxpayers provided about $5 billion to aid Ukraine in this effort in the years immediately following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Liberal internationalist neocons seemingly have such arrogance and lust for power that they apparently want to try to run the whole world. We are now $37 trillion in debt, and a large part has come from our interventionism into wars, conflicts, and disputes around the globe.

Victoria Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, are two of the nation’s leading neocons, people who columnist George Will described as the “most radical” people in Washington, D.C.

I know many millions of people hate or despise President Trump, but the overwhelming majority of people appreciate his efforts to try to put America first, and only the most bitterly partisan Democrats will criticize his efforts to end wars.

In the book “Eisenhower Vs. Warren,” author James F. Simon wrote: “Ever the optimist, even as tensions mounted with the Soviet Union over the governance of postwar Germany, Eisenhower believed that the United States and the Soviet Union could live in peaceful co-existence. On a visit to Moscow at Stalin’s invitation in August 1945, he said at a news conference, ‘I see nothing in the future that would prevent Russia and the United States from being the closest of friends.’”

Simon’s book also said, “behind Ike’s irresistible grin and relentless good humor was a man of strong opinions on the most controversial issues of the day. He had been appalled when he was told … of the plan to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. ‘So I voiced … my grave misgivings … first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.’”

On Dec. 16, 2024, I wrote a column entitled “Trump Should Pattern Presidency After Eisenhower.” I started that column with Eisenhower’s statement to his chief of staff: “God help the nation when it has a president who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.”

I admire Eisenhower not only because he was our most anti-war president, but also because he had the courage to issue 181 vetoes, only two of which were overridden. He faced a Democrat-controlled Congress for six of his eight years in the White House.

I say Eisenhower was our most anti-war president because of his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 18, 1953; his refusal to obey Israel’s demand to go to war with them against Egypt in 1956; his willingness to reduce the defense budget; and his farewell address on Jan. 19, 1961, warning against the military-industrial complex.

Also, in opposing neocon interventionism, I wish President Trump and his top aides would read these words from President Kennedy’s speech in Seattle, Washington on November 16, 1961: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient – that we are only six percent [now four percent] of the world’s population and that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind – that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that, therefore, there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.” And we weren’t even close to $37 trillion in debt then.

This article was originally published on Knoxville Focus.

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Our waning and wanton superpower wields the world’s most expensive military, with the most expensive armaments. Washington, DC’s privilege, emerging technology, and newly assumed mantle of global mightiness fused like a bad weld in the 1947 National Security Act, producing a unleashable CIA and an unbounded and unhinged Department of Defense.

It is right and proper that this permanent military bureaucracy be known as the Department of War. Everyone on the planet recognizes that it has not conducted defense one single day since its formation.

We’ll remember the Department of Defense for many reasons, most iconic perhaps the tracking of a willowy Chinese weather balloon from its long dramatic drift eastward, with a final “safe” shoot-down by an F-22 with a Sidewinder missile in February 2023.  It fell six miles off the South Carolina coast in 47 feet of water. Triumphal reports stated “No one was hurt.”

Trump’s sense of the Pentagon is typical of his predecessors. US presidents enjoy and relish the ability to murder, maim and destroy by their command, anytime, anywhere. Future generations will categorize the greatest democracies and self-proclaimed republics with tyrants and kings, based on the incredible ease with which unpopular and average men could and would attack whole populations and governments, foreign and domestic.

There is no law, but the king’s law; L’etat, c’est moi.” Lord Acton, in an 1887 letter to the Archbishop of the Church of England, protested Mr. Creighton’s going easy on the crimes of England’s political leadership.  We all know this part: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  But Acton continues:  “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

It is in this spirit that we must view the US Department of War, as no worse heresy against the Founders, against the intent and language of the Constitution, and against the very Enlightenment. Certainly, nothing has changed in Pentagon practice and performance, long bristling with forward deployed arms and vocal threats around the world, lecturing others on peace and freedom while disrupting the very mooring of that peace or freedom, at home as abroad. The language of war, and the evil that is war, stands fully exposed now.  It is now openly relished by politicians, corporations and political donors to pimp a draft for battle fodder and a taking of your meager wealth and property, all in the name of War!

A kind reader recently shared with me a short essay written by one of the American Founding Fathers, Benjamin Rush.  The debate then, as now, regards the Department of War.  Rush advocated a “Department of Peace” to serve as a “counterethic.”  The essay is provided below, as we reflect on what the United States has become, and pontificate on how much longer our own experiment in governance can persist.

   ——————————————

“A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States”

Among the defects which have been pointed out in the Federal Constitution by its antifederal enemies, it is much to be lamented that no person has taken notice of its total silence upon the subject of an office of the utmost importance to the welfare of the United States, that is, an office for promoting and preserving perpetual peace in our country.

It is to be hoped that no objection will be made to the establishment of such an office, while we are engaged in a war with the Indians, for as the War-Office of the United States was established in time of peace, it is equally reasonable that a Peace-Office should be established in the time of war.

The plan of this office is as follows:

1. Let a Secretary of the Peace be appointed to preside in this office, who shall be perfectly free from all the present absurd and vulgar European prejudices upon the subject of government. Let him be a genuine republican and a sincere Christian, for the principles of republicanism and Christianity are no less friendly to universal and perpetual peace than they are to universal and equal liberty.
2. Let a power be given to this Secretary to establish and maintain free-schools in every city, village, and township of the United States; and let him be made responsible for the talents, principles, and morals of all his schoolmasters. Let the youth of our country be carefully instructed in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and in the doctrines of a religion of some kind: the Christian religion should be preferred to all others, for it belongs to this religion exclusively to teach us not only to cultivate peace with men, but to forgive—nay more, to love—our very enemies. It belongs to it further to teach us that the Supreme Being alone possesses a power to take away human life, and that we rebel against his laws whenever we undertake to execute death in any way whatever upon any of his creatures.

III. Let every family in the United States be furnished at the public expense, by the Secretary of this office, with a copy of an American edition of the BIBLE. This measure has become the more necessary in our country since the banishment of the Bible, as a school-book, from most of the schools in the United States. Unless the price of this book be paid for by the public, there is reason to fear that in a few years it will be met with only in courts of justice or in magistrates’ offices; and should the absurd mode of establishing truth by kissing this sacred book fall into disuse, it may probably, in the course of the next generation, be seen only as a curiosity on a shelf in a public museum.

1. Let the following sentence be inscribed in letters of gold over the doors of every State and Court house in the United States:

THE SON OF MAN CAME INTO THE WORLD NOT TO DESTROY MEN’S LIVES,

BUT TO SAVE THEM.

1. To inspire a veneration for human life, and an horror at the shedding of blood, let all those laws be repealed which authorize juries, judges, sheriffs, or hangmen to assume the resentments of individuals and to commit murder in cold blood in any case whatever. Until this reformation in our code of penal jurisprudence takes place, it will be in vain to attempt to introduce universal and perpetual peace in our country.
2. To subdue that passion for war which education, added to human depravity, have made universal, a familiarity with the instruments of death, as well as all military shows, should be carefully avoided. For which reason, militia laws should everywhere be repealed, and military dresses and military titles should be laid aside: reviews tend to lessen the horrors of a battle by connecting them with the charms of order; militia laws generate idleness and vice, and thereby produce the wars they are said to prevent; military dresses fascinate the minds of young men, and lead them from serious and useful professions; were there no uniforms, there would probably be no armies; lastly, military titles feed vanity, and keep up ideas in the mind which lessen a sense of the folly and miseries of war.

VII. In the last place, let a large room, adjoining the federal hall, be appropriated for transacting the business and preserving all the records of this office. Over the door of this room let there be a sign, on which the figure of a LAMB, a DOVE, and an OLIVE BRANCH should be painted, together with the following inscriptions in letters of gold:

PEACE ON EARTH—GOOD-WILL TO MAN.

AH! WHY WILL MEN FORGET THAT THEY ARE BRETHREN?

Within this apartment let there be a collection of plough-shares and pruning-hooks made out of swords and spears; and on each of the walls of the apartment, the following pictures as large as life:

1. A lion eating straw with an ox, and an adder playing upon the lips of a child.
2. An Indian boiling his venison in the same pot with a citizen of Kentucky.
3. Lord Cornwallis and Tippoo Saib, under the shade of a sycamore-tree in the East Indies, drinking Madeira wine together out of the same decanter.
4. A group of French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm and arm, under a bower erected in the neighborhood of Mons.
5. A St. Domingo planter, a man of color, and a native of Africa, legislating together in the same colonial assembly.

To complete the entertainment of this delightful apartment, let a group of young ladies, clad in white robes, assemble every day at a certain hour, in a gallery to be erected for the purpose, and sing odes, and hymns, and anthems in praise of the blessings of peace.

One of these songs should consist of the following lines:

Peace o’er the world her olive wand extends,

And white-rob’d Innocence from heaven descends.

All crimes shall cease, and ancient frauds shall fail,

Returning Justice lift aloft her scale.

In order to more deeply affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign which is placed over the door of the War Office:

1. An office for butchering the human species.
2. A Widow and Orphan making office.
3. A broken bone making office.
4. A wooden leg making office.
5. An office for the creating of public and private vices.
6. An office for creating a public debt.
7. An office for creating speculators, stock jobbers, and bankrupts.
8. An office for creating famine.
9. An office for creating pestilential diseases.
10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty and national happiness.

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence or any object but the ruins of deserted farm houses.

Above this group of woeful figures, let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood:

NATIONAL GLORY

   ——————————————

Benjamin Rush, we hear you still.  The horrors of US-supported, instigated, facilitated and justified wars at home and abroad in the 21st Century alone prove your point.  God help us all.

The post Is Too Late to Establish a Department of Peace? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The noble cause of historic development and peace looks more feasible after the spectacular events in China.

The historic cause of peace and development for humanity will prevail, declared China’s President Xi Jinping this week. He was speaking at the 80th anniversary of the Chinese people’s defeat of Japanese imperialism in 1945 and the victory against world fascism. There was much to inspire hope and confidence in his bold declaration, despite the world being haunted by horrific violence, tensions, and fears of war.

First, there was the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Tianjin, which brought together the leaders of China, Russia, and India, as well as 20 other heads of state. The SCO, founded in 2001, is now a global forum underpinning the reality of a multipolar world. It constitutes nearly half of the world’s population, and its commitment to multilateral and equal security for all nations – as stated in the Tianjin Declaration – makes it a truly representative platform of the global majority. Many countries, especially from the Global South, are pressing to join the SCO, viewing it as the authentic and archetypal defender of their sovereign rights. As such, the SCO is the security complement to the BRICS alliance and its objective of fairer economic multilateral development.

Thus, the multipolar world is no longer an abstract aspiration but rather a political and economic reality. The commitment to multilateral development has organizational and institutional mechanisms to implement benign concepts of mutual and cooperative development. The new, more democratic international order has surpassed the U.S.-led Western-centric system. The latter emerged from European colonialism and only ever served a global minority within the West.

President Xi reiterated that the principles of the multipolar order are respecting the equality and sovereignty of nations, abiding by international law, non-interference in the affairs of other nations, and the prohibition of unilateral aggression. His global governance initiative is the fulfillment of the UN Charter established in 1945 after World War II. Xi said that the new multipolar order is based on genuine respect and equality of nations and is a rejection of Cold War mentality, hegemonism, and unilateral imposition of rights. He did not mention the United States by name, but it was clear to whom he was referring.

For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that commitment to the multilateral principles of the UN Charter and its reiteration by the SCO is the only way to guarantee peaceful world development. Putin said the Western order of hegemony, unilateralism, and neo-colonial domination is now obsolete. The Russian leader said the U.S.-led order was the source of conflict, injustice, and poverty.

It was powerfully symbolic that the leaders of China, India, and Russia were visibly committed to a shared development vision. Their convivial personal interaction was an impressive show of mutual understanding and solidarity. It was a vivid demonstration that Washington’s threats of imposing secondary sanctions to divide India and China from Russia were dismissed as empty bluster of a has-been empire. That image of fraternal solidarity between Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, and Vladimir Putin, among many other images this week, was emblematic of enfeebled U.S. power. It inspires faith in human cooperation for the greater good, as opposed to the nasty zero-sum mentality of Western politicians.

Now we come to the military parade in Beijing that took place after the SCO summit. The event marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia, when the Chinese nation defeated imperial Japan and its genocidal occupation. The military parade was the largest ever held by China, and it showcased the People’s Republic as an invincible military superpower. The unmistakable message to the United States was: if you dare provoke a war with China, you will be defeated. (The same can be said, of course, by Russia.)

The resounding military display in Beijing was not for the purpose of fetishizing war machinery. It was simply a demonstration that the multipolar world is proceeding with unbreachable security and regardless of Washington’s machinations to thwart it. Attempts by the United States and its NATO vassals to disrupt the multipolar world and to prop up a failed hegemonic system through violence and intimidation are futile. Western aggression and imperialistic intrigues are no longer able to dominate international relations.

The era of U.S. military dominance is over. China’s display of awesome military power this week is a reality check, globally televised, that the U.S. is a spent force, no longer capable of bullying and terrorizing others, except maybe for speedboats in the Caribbean.

As Presidents Xi and Putin remarked this week, the historic victory over fascism 80 years ago – a victory that the Chinese and Russian people largely won through the combined sacrifice of 60 million victims – is the sacred foundation for the multipolar world. The victory remains the starting point for world progress by overcoming imperialist aggression and criminality.

The Pax Americana, the American Century, or the “rules-based order” that the West declared after World War II was always a fraud. It was, in reality, a covert perversion of the noble UN Charter and a continuation of fascist aggression, albeit in the disguised rhetoric of Western virtue.

The noble cause of historic development and peace looks more feasible after the spectacular events in China, showing crucial global unity and power for the greater good of humanity. Humanity is liberated from fear and the specter of endless wars as a more civilized, just, and peaceful world beckons. Hegemony is vanquished.

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

The post Why the World Can Be More Hopeful After the Historic Week in China appeared first on LewRockwell.

Is this a sign of a shift in the global U.S. strategy?

Politico reports:

Pentagon plan prioritizes homeland over China threat
This marks a major departure from the first Trump administration, which emphasized deterring Beijing.

Pentagon officials are proposing the department prioritize protecting the homeland and Western Hemisphere, a striking reversal from the military’s yearslong mandate to focus on the threat from China.

A draft of the newest National Defense Strategy, which landed on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk last week, places domestic and regional missions above countering adversaries such as Beijing and Moscow, according to three people briefed on early versions of the report.

The move would mark a major shift from recent Democrat and Republican administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term in office, when he referred to Beijing as America’s greatest rival. And it would likely inflame China hawks in both parties who view the country’s leadership as a danger to U.S. security.

“This is going to be a major shift for the U.S. and its allies on multiple continents,” said one of the people briefed on the draft document. “The old, trusted U.S. promises are being questioned.”

The National Defense Strategy (NDS) is written by the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy which currently is held by arch-Realist Elbridge Colby.

The draft of the new NDS seems to be a contradiction of his previous believes:

Identifying as a realist, Colby believes China is the principal threat faced by the United States. He believes the US should shift its military resources to Asia to prevent a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. Colby supports reducing military aid to Ukraine. During the AUKUS review in 2025, Elbridge pressured Australia to confirm what role it would play in a war with China over Taiwan.

Colby wants to change U.S. defense policy from concentrating on China, as he had previously argued, to the Western Hemisphere. He may have seen new facts that have moved his opinion.

The failed attempt by the U.S. Navy to secure shipping through the Red Sea against attacks by Houthi in Yemen may have caused such rethink. As may have the loss of the US/NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Or did he compare videos of the ‘woke’ U.S. military parade in Washington DC (vid) earlier this year with the recent flawless one in China (vid)? The difference was indeed glaring. It demonstrated that the U.S. has no chance of winning in a war against China.

Trump seems to concede that China is winning:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump – Sep 04, 2025, 22:14 UTC

Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together! President Donald J. Trump

It is difficult to believe though that the Trump administration will be able to change U.S. grand strategy. Any change  will typically happen only at a snail’s pace. It would need all party support over multiple administrations. The pivot to Asia was launched by the Obama administration in 2010 and has since has been followed by all later ones.

More from Politico:

Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, is leading the strategy. He played a key role in writing the 2018 version during Trump’s first term and has been a staunch supporter of a more isolationist American policy. Despite his long track record as a China hawk, Colby aligns with Vice President JD Vance on the desire to disentangle the U.S. from foreign commitments.

Colby’s policy team is also responsible for a forthcoming global posture review, which outlines where U.S. forces are stationed around the globe, and a theater air and missile defense review, which takes stock of U.S. and allies’ air defenses and makes recommendations for where to locate American systems. The Pentagon is expected to release both reviews as soon as next month.

It is expected that the new global posture review will move U.S. military resources from Europe, and probably also from Asia, back to the States.

But a shift in resources may well be all that there is.

Over the last year the U.S. has urged its ‘allies’ to invest more in defense than previously. Moving U.S. resources away from where allies take over is not a real change of strategy.

The U.S. pulls back from Ukraine but pushes the Europeans to continue the war against Russia. The general aim of ‘weakening Russia’, thus stays the same.

So while U.S. military resources are shrinking or shifting to geographically more nearby issues the overarching grand strategy aim, the achievement of global U.S. primacy, may well stay the same. It is just that other are pushed to carry a bigger burden for it. Colby’s pressure on Australia and Japan is pointing that way.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post When The Pentagon Shifts Its Priorities Will U.S. Strategy Follow? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Reform UK could strip FCA of power to regulate banking if elected | Reform UK | The Guardian

Nigel Farage reportedly plans to overhaul rules governing City of London that were introduced after 2008 financial crash

Nigel Farage could strip the City watchdog of its power to regulate the banking industry under a sweeping overhaul to undo changes made after the 2008 financial crisis if Reform UK was elected to government.

The leader of the party at the top of opinion polls has said he wants to prepare for the potential for an early general election in 2027.

A metals trader before entering politics, Farage has told allies that a Reform UK government would sweep away rules governing the City of London as a priority to boost economic growth, the Financial Times reported.

This would include stripping the Financial Conduct Authority of its role in regulating banks, with control handed instead to the Bank of England. “Nigel thinks the FCA is a disaster and banking regulation needs to go back to the Bank of England,” a source close to Farage told the paper.

Such a development would reverse changes introduced by the former Conservative chancellor George Osborne to strengthen consumer protection and increase financial stability after the worst banking crash of the postwar era.

Under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, the Financial Services Authority was abolished and its powers to handle financial stability issues was handed to the Bank of England, while the FCA was created to oversee industry conduct and consumer protection.

Farage has been a prominent critic of Britain’s biggest banks after the debanking scandal involving NatWest Group’s Coutts private bank, which closed his account in 2023.

After looking into the scandal the FCA ordered UK banks to treat politicians more fairly, but drew fierce criticism from Farage after it said it had found no evidence of customers’ accounts being closed because of their political views.

Reform UK, whose party conference got under way on Friday, has previously promised to sweep away City rules and cut taxes to help bolster the development of the cryptocurrency sector in the UK. It also said it would accept donations in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Crypto companies are heavily involved in the party’s conference at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre Reform UK’s efficiency chief, Zia Yusuf, is hosting a session with Stani Kulechov, the Finnish founder of a company called Aave Labs. The crypto startup Zebec Technologies is a sponsor.

Businesses engaged in gold trading are also exhibitors at the event, including Direction Bullion, which has one of the biggest stands at the conference. Farage was reported last year to be a paid brand ambassador for the company.

Reform UK has been approached for comment.

The post The City of London: Reform UK Could Strip FCA of Power to Regulate Banking if Elected – Nigel Farage Reportedly Plans to Overhaul Rules Governing City of London That Were Introduced after 2008 Financial Crash appeared first on LewRockwell.

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