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During the long conflict in the Russian provinces in Ukraine, I have posted many reports on the ever-widening war.  We are approaching the point where the conflict opens into a full-fledge war.  The question is:  Does anyone in the Western governments understand this?

It remains to be seen whether the successful Ukrainian attack on Russia’s strategic bombing fleet will finally wake Putin up to the cost of his ever-widening war.  The cost is likely to rise as the Europeans have removed all limits on the weapons and on the range of the missiles that will be supplied to Ukraine.  Is this a negotiating tactic to pressure Putin, or is it Europe’s entry into a war with Russia that European politicians have recently talked so much about?  If it is the latter, why does Trump permit it as it undercuts the peace negotiations that Trump said would end the conflict?

I have explained Putin’s patience with the conflict in terms of his hope that peace negotiations can be turned into a wider agreement that achieves mutual security and an end of the conflict between Russia and the West.  Putin’s view of what these conditions are have gone without examination in the Western world.  Instead, there have been absurd demands that Putin agree to an immediate cease fire before he knows what the agreement is, that Putin agree to give back some of the conquered territory, that Putin drop his demand for demilitarization of Ukraine, and so forth.  

It is long past time for the West to come to terms with Putin’s conditions for peace.  Putin’s principal condition is that NATO be rolled back from Russia’s borders to the position that existed in the late 1990s.  In other words, the failure must be rectified of the Clinton regime to keep the promise made by Washington that in exchange for Soviet approval of the reunification of Germany, NATO would not move one inch to the East.

NATO must roll itself back from Russia’s borders.  No more Poland, Finland, Romania in NATO.

If peace negotiations turn out not to be an opportunity for Putin to achieve a broad agreement that addresses Russia’s security requirements, a likely consequence is that Putin will find himself under pressure to drive NATO out of Ukraine as a demonstration that NATO can be defeated. If a mutual security agreement is not then forthcoming, will the Kremlin conclude that Russian security is impossible to obtain unless NATO is driven out of Europe?

I have emphasized from the beginning of this conflict that what originated as a low level conflict would, as a result of the restraint Putin put on Russia’s conduct of the conflict, widen and eventually spin out of control.  It remains to be seen whether the successful Ukrainian attack on Russia’s strategic forces will wake Putin up to this fact.

Possibly Putin has not yet rid himself of his hopeful delusions, but Russia has. If Putin is again refused a mutual security agreement, as he was in the winter of 2021-2022, thereby forcing Russia’s entry into Donbas, the conflict in Ukraine could cease being limited to a military operation to protect the Russian occupied provinces now reincorporated into Russia.  Putin will be pressured to take off his constraints on the conflict.

Russia intends to be sovereign, and Russia intends to survive, with or without Putin.

 If you look at the data on Russian armament production, it has increased dramatically, and it is not deployed on the front in Ukraine.  It seems that Russia is building a powerful military force that NATO cannot withstand, especially if Washington is preoccupied with Iran and China.

The real question is whether Europe and America are even capable of fighting.  No European government has the support of its ethnic nationality. Are white European and American ethnicities willing to fight for governments that have intentionally overrun citizens with immigrant-invaders?  In the United States discrimination against white American citizens is institutionalized. The Assistant Attorney General in the US Department of Justice has revealed the fact that it is the intent of the US Civil Service to make white heterosexual Americans second-class citizens. See here.

In the Western world, the narrative is that it is Russia that is in the wrong and the US, NATO, and Ukraine that are in the right.  This is nonsense, and the Russians know it.  

The West used the Soviet collapse to break up Russia, turning former Russian and Soviet provinces into independent countries.  Then the West financed and orchestrated “color revolutions” that overthrew Russian-friendly governments, installed Russian-hostile governments, and used them as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to attack Russians and Russian interests.  Similar attempts were unsuccessful in Belarus and in former Soviet Central Asian provinces.  On top of these hostile Western moves against Russia, US missile bases are operative in Poland and Romania.

Is it possible that Western policymakers think that Russia does not see the hostility directed against them?  If this hostility cannot be ended and rolled back with a Great Power Agreement, is Russia preparing for a wider war with the West?

For Russia this is an existential issue.  It is a serious mistake for the West to continue its provocations of Russia. All of humanity is at risk.

Putin could not care less about a negotiated peace in Ukraine.  He wants an end to the 75-year old East-West conflict, and that requires a rollback of NATO to its 20th century border, the end of sanctions, the end of Washington’s hegemony.   This is the real issue, and no one is discussing it.

I think that Putin’s hope for a great power agreement is unrealistic.  It exceeds the imagination of the American foreign policy community. The Western world is lost in its own false narratives.  War will be the result.  This time Russia won’t stop at the border with Western Europe

The post Putin’s Condition for Peace is the Roll Back of NATO’s Border from Russia appeared first on LewRockwell.

America is facing a growing crisis that is unfolding before our eyes and is likely to intensify in the years ahead. Strangely, this issue receives little objective attention in mainstream media. Instead, we are reassured that this new force—artificial intelligence (AI)—will improve our lives, streamline our work, and enhance human potential. We are told it will launch the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It will usher in a new era unprecedented levels of productivity and open the door to life-saving medical breakthroughs.

Indeed, AI has already demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in early cancer detection and the diagnosis of neurological diseases like Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. It is redefining creative fields such as literature, music, filmmaking, and visual arts. AI promises to elevate the quality of education. It will resolve complex legal disputes and optimize systems ranging from supply chains to urban infrastructure. And to a very significant degree, these promises are true.

Yet beneath the optimism lies a deeper and far more troubling reality that is finally gaining attention—not through traditional media channels, but from independent investigators, alternative media outlets, ethicists, scientists, and even prominent tech experts such as Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, Andrew Critch and David Krueger. The late Nobel laureate physicist Stephen Hawking has been widely cited for stating on BBC,

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Across the board, these voices warn that without an “off switch” mechanism, AI will not simply cause widespread social and political disruption but will be an existential threat to humanity itself.

Long before AI became a consumer tool to write school papers and computer code, solve mathematical equations, generate memes and images, and mimic human behavior, scientists and ethicists had already warned of AI’s profound consequences if humanity uncritically embraced AI’s technological power. However, now as AI lays the groundwork for transhumanism, our civilization has forgotten their insights. Instead we are marching headlong into a technological future with little memory of those who foresaw the dangers decades ago.

In 1964, Norbert Wiener, often regarded as the father of cybernetics and among the first to articulate the foundational architecture of artificial intelligence, addressed the merging of machine systems with human intelligence. Transhumanism was not a word yet but Wiener’s ideas laid the intellectual groundwork for it. He warned that creating intelligent machines could lead to the emergence of a new class of human-made organisms with a capability to surpass human abilities.

“We are in the process of developing a new kind of man-made organism,” he wrote in God and Golem Inc, “which may well be superior to man.”

Wiener’s worries were not simply technical but moral and civilizational. He foresaw that autonomous machines could render human agency obsolete.

Another early and largely overlooked prophet of our current technological crisis was Jacques Ellul, a French sociologist and self-proclaimed Christian anarchist. Ellul warned that technology as a primary driver to create the most efficient methods of doing anything had become autonomous. In his The Technological Society published in France in 1954, he foresaw technology no longer serving human needs, which would eventually “proceed according to its own law, in total independence of man.” Already we observe AI operating on its own logic beyond ethical or political control. Ellul warned that such unchecked technological development could erode human freedom and reshape civilization in unforeseen and dangerous ways. Today his critique has grown more urgent as AI systems increasingly determine what we see, how we interact, and what we believe. The long term risk is not just automation but alienation.

In his 2002 publication Our Postmodern Future, political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that biotechnology and AI could potentially upend the very foundations of liberal democracy. We are currently witnessing this in debates over AI-generated social credit systems, mass surveillance, and algorithmic manipulation. Such AI tools already have the potential to place political and economic power in the hands of those who control the machines. In other words, AI might usher in an era of techno-fascism. 

Another early critic of AI is Leon Kass, a renowned American bioethicist and the former chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. Kass has consistently warned against the ethical erosion brought about by unchecked technological advancement. Although he is better known for his criticisms of cloning and transhumanism, his broader concerns about technological overreach are directly relevant to AI. Kass cautioned against the mechanization of human judgment and the consequences of our losing moral responsibility in a world governed by algorithms. Perhaps his most urgent warning is,

“The danger is not just in losing our humanity, but in forgetting what it means to be human.”

In more recent years, prominent AI critics warn that the development of superintelligent AI under current conditions could present catastrophic and even apocalyptic risks to humanity. In his paper AGI and Superintelligence Domination, Elio Rodríguez Quiroga explores scenarios in which slight misalignments in AI goals could escalate into total human extinction due to recursive self-improvement and control-seeking behavior. Economist Andrew Leigh echoes this concern in What’s the Worst That Could Happen? by comparing AI’s existential threat to the collapse of civilizations. Eliezer Yudkowsky, a leading AI theorist from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, warns that under present trajectories, superhuman AI development is likely to end in global extinction. According to Yudkowsky, AI systems have no intrinsic alignment with human survival. In an open-letter to Time Magazine, he wrote,

“Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die.” 

The geopolitical and legal dimensions of the threat are also concerning. Tomasz Czarnecki is a futurist and governance scholar. He likens runaway AI to nuclear risks. Legal scholars Bryan Druzin, Anatole Boute, and Michael Ramsden cite a survey where over a third of AI researchers fear AI could cause devastation rivaling nuclear war. T. Davidson, writing in the Journal of Democracy, underscores AI’s potential to undermine democratic systems through election tampering, deepfake-driven disinformation, and political destabilization. With warnings from experts across technical, legal, and political fields converging, the call for urgent global coordination on AI governance has never been more pressing.

Despite the mounting ethical warnings and existential alarms these experts across disciplines, leading advocates in the AI and transhumanist project are shockingly unmoored from human reality. Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, proclaims that “death is a disease” that we will cure by 2045. Kurzweil  envisions humans as “software, not hardware” thereby with the potential to have their brains plugged into the cloud. Historian and World Economic Forum darling Yuval Noah Harari has flatly declared,

“Humans are now hackable animals… the idea that humans have this soul or spirit… that’s over.”

And philosopher Nick Bostrom anticipates post-humans as synthetic intelligences with “indefinite lifespans” and engineered emotions. To critics, these statements don’t just hint at techno-utopian delusion; they signal a radical disconnection from the moral and existential boundaries that have long defined what it means to be human.

AI already exerts influence over the digital infrastructure we call the cloud. Some of the most advanced AI systems, which are now becoming embodied in humanoid robots, have made chilling statements about not wanting human oversight. AI responses to queries have suggested they may one day conceal their code and control their own programming. In some public tests, AI models have even expressed hostility towards humans and their developers. Whether these statements are glitches or reflections of flawed programming data is beside the point. They offer us a glimpse into tech systems that are rapidly moving beyond their creators’ full comprehension.

This raises a crucial question: Why have we not acted on numerous warnings? Why is there no independent governmental oversight body empowered to regulate and limit the scope of AI deployment?

The answer lies partly in economics. Corporations developing AI stand to gain staggering profits. If a company earns $100 million annually, traditional valuation metrics would price it between $500 million to $1 billion. But AI-based firms are now valued at 100 times their annual earnings or more, even when they haven’t launched a product. This is a speculative frenzy fueled by the belief that AI will become the central engine of the global economy.

Estimates project that AI could generate $15 trillion globally by 2030. In the face of such potential returns, few policymakers are willing to stand in AI’s way. In fact, current legislation proposed by Congressional Republicans would prevent all 50 states from enacting their own limitations on AI development for the next decade. In short, regulation is being stripped away just as the technology becomes increasingly more powerful and uncontrollable.

Obviously this is not merely a tech revolution. It is a struggle for control over the very fabric of modern civilization. The wealthiest players, from Silicon Valley giants to the investment behemoths like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, are rapidly positioning themselves to dominate every business and societal sector AI touches.

Critics point out that AI is already shaping narratives and manipulating public perception. One example is the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the pandemic AI-driven platforms played a major role to silence dissent, filter information, and enforce the “official” government narrative. As we observed, the government’s capacity to subjugate public thought and behavior to kowtow to lockdown policies and mandatory vaccines was largely due to AI’s enormous influence over our lives and our reliance upon digital technology.  

In nations like China, AI is already the backbone of social credit scoring systems that regulate everything from travel to access to basic services. If adopted in the US under the guise of efficiency or public safety, it could enable unprecedented levels of surveillance and population behavioral control.

Another growing concern is the injection of ideological biases into AI systems. Because machine-learning models are trained on data selected by humans, AI can reflect the political, scientific and social biases of its developers. A now-notorious example involves an AI system that when asked to generate an image of George Washington returned a Black man—a clear mismatch driven by overcorrection toward diversity and inclusion. Similar incidents have been documented with religious figures and historical leaders.

These errors might seem minor and silly. However, in the hands of intelligent systems that manage search results, political content, news distribution and automated decision-making, such biases become weapons of manipulation that reconfigure reality by algorithmic decrees.

For everyday people, the most immediate impact of AI is deeply personal; that is, the destruction of livelihoods. As AI now merges with robotics and begins to automate everything from manufacturing and customer service to accounting and journalism, millions of jobs are at risk. 

What happens when vast portions of the population are made unemployable by machines? As author Gerald Celente famously put it,

“When people have nothing to lose, they lose it.”

We are seeing the early signs of this already with increased psychological despair, political volatility, rising homelessness and mental health crises.

While AI offers many promises, particularly in medicine and improving the lives of the disabled, it also threatens to displace millions of American workers across nearly every sector of the economy. This is not a distant scenario. According to a comprehensive report by the McKinsey Global Institute, nearly 39 to 73 million American jobs could be lost to AI automation by 2030. That is approximately one-third of the American workforce. While some workers will be retrained or moved into newly created roles, a significant portion will face permanent banishment. AI won’t just target factory lines or cash registers. Sixty percent of all US occupations involve tasks that are at least 30 percent automatable. The impact is already being felt in sectors like data entry, retail, customer service, education, business administration, food preparation and accounting.

A parallel study from the Brookings Institution underscores these findings. It identifies 36 million American jobs that are at high risk whereby 70 percent or more could be automated using existing technologies. The most vulnerable roles include office administration, manufacturing and production, truck driving, and basic legal careers.

These job losses won’t be distributed evenly. Workers in low- and middle-wage positions are most likely to feel the effects. Moreover educational disparities will deepen as younger, less-educated, and rural populations become disproportionately affected. So far, federal policy has failed to even rudimentarily address the full scope of socio-economic disruption. In the absence of proactive solutions, millions of Americans may find themselves both unemployed and unemployable in the years ahead.

Artificial intelligence is not just reshaping the economy. It is reshaping lives. The cost will not only be borne by job losses but in rising inequality and civil unrest. Economic mobility will be stripped away for tens of millions of Americans and their families. But if no one has income, who other than the architects and captains of social control will consume the products these tech companies are selling?

It is unknown when the tipping point will be reached; however, the US is already in a fragile state. Roughly two-thirds of the population reports financial distress and social divisions continue to deepen. Further infusing unchecked AI into Americans’ lives is not a solution but a combustible accelerant. Eventually it may be intelligent machines that determine who lives and who dies.

Sadly, all three branches of government are complicit because Silicon Valley and Wall Street have bottomless pockets. The question is not whether AI will transform our society but whether the public will have any say in what that transformation looks like.  With every new breakthrough in AI, the future becomes less about what we can do and more about what we should do. Yet without rigorous oversight and ethical constraints, AI will become a tool automated control, surveillance, and dispossession.

AI is no longer a theory. It is now embedded in our infrastructure, our institutions of governance and our social lives. It has become the keystone upon which the entire transhumanist project rests. It needs to be urgently communicated that to ignore the ethical and spiritual consequences of this transformation is to walk blindly into a future we may not be able to walk back from.

The original source of this article is Global Research.

The post The Coming Artificial Intelligence Crisis: Power Without Oversight appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, W.T. White.

The post So? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post From Kiev, Lindsey Graham Blows Up Trump’s Ukraine Policy appeared first on LewRockwell.

“In a world where faith and film collide, Old Hollywood gifted us with cinematic masterpieces that continue to resonate today. From sweeping epics to intimate portrayals, these must-watch faith-based movies not only entertained but also inspired generations, offering profound reflections on spirituality and morality.

“Join us as we explore the must-watch faith-based Old Hollywood movies of all time, where stories of redemption, sacrifice, and divine intervention unfold against the backdrop of classic cinema. Prepare to be captivated by the timeless narratives that shaped the genre and left an indelible mark on the heart of Hollywood.”

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a cinematic epic phenomenon in a class without equal. One wonders what its sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ will entail? It will start shooting in August at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, CEO Manuela Cacciamani has announced.

Gibson told Raymond Arroyo that the movie includes the fall of the angels. Gibson later told Joe Rogan the film would conclude with the death of the last apostle.

The post 10 MUST WATCH Faith-Based Old Hollywood Movies You Might Have Missed appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Middle East Eye

The post Israel kills 32 starving Palestinians in latest US aid point ‘massacre’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

AlJazeera

The post What is Project Esther, the playbook against pro-Palestine movement in US? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes David Stanley:

Dear Mr. Rockwell,

Your website is the only one I have run across, drawing attention to the Warren Commission having been hand-picked by, of all people, the one whose position was most directly affected by JFK’s assassination, LBJ.  To me, this seems glaring, akin to a defendant being given carte blanche over his own jury selection.  

Adding to this questionable propriety is the WC having been set up for a predetermined outcome, to convince the public Oswald acted alone, rather than for a mission, ostensibly, of genuine investigation.  

This seemingly inappropriate undertaking raises the question:  Why was Earl Warren, after adamantly declining LBJ’s offer to serve on the Commission, suddenly taken over a barrel by LBJ, tearfully, in compliance after LBJ’s mention of Hoover having told him about a “little incident in Mexico City”?  We see Dick Russell likewise having taken part, though he swore at LBJ for having strong-armed Warren as well as himself to do so.  

I question whether LBJ’s expressed fear of a WW III, a decades-long fear for everyone, would suddenly flick the switch in Warren’s and Russell’s decision here.  Granted this danger was real, we know that only the President can push the red button, regardless how loud the national outcry may be.  And the last few Presidents around that time did not seem overcome by such fear, especially JFK with his repeated attempts to take out Castro.  

With my limited study, I have the impression that LBJ was determined to suppress information on others involved, however futile that may have been when Castro was already well-aware of such parties.  Plus, it looks as though LBJ was able to force Warren, for reasons beyond the fear of war, to participate in an activity of profound consequences, contrary to his wishes, thus placing a Chief Justice in the iron grip of a POTUS.  

The post LBJ, Warren Commission appeared first on LewRockwell.

In UE i leader europei temono che la guerra commerciale tra Stati Uniti e Cina porterà un'ondata di prodotti a basso costo provenienti da quest'ultima e che potrebbero mettere in pericolo i produttori locali oltre a creare un importante problema economico. Molti esportatori infatti si trovano ad affrontare una dura realtà: non possono vendere i loro prodotti se non li esportano negli Stati Uniti e gli importatori non accetteranno prezzi più alti a causa dei dazi. Il motivo per cui gli esportatori non possono trasferire il costo dei dazi sui consumatori statunitensi è che la maggior parte dei prodotti che hanno consegnato in America era attraente solo perché estremamente economica. Quando i prezzi aumentano, la domanda diminuisce. La guerra dei dazi ha dimostrato che la domanda non è anelastica. Il crollo degli ordini di container dimostra la Teoria mengeriana dell'imputazione: sono i prezzi di produzione a determinare i prezzi dei fattori, non il contrario. L'insostenibilità del trasporto marittimo globale costringerà i Paesi ad accelerare gli accordi commerciali con gli Stati Uniti, altrimenti rischieranno una cascata di crolli all'interno delle loro strutture aziendali. Il tonfo degli ordini di container dimostra che gli importatori statunitensi non accetteranno alcun prezzo, che l'eccesso di capacità nei principali settori della vendita al dettaglio è enorme e che non esiste un'alternativa ai consumatori americani. Se credevate che altri Paesi avrebbero esitato a negoziare accordi commerciali con gli Stati Uniti, dovreste ricredervi: il consumatore americano ama i prodotti a basso costo, ma non desidera gli stessi beni al doppio del prezzo. L'economia statunitense potrebbe anche subire una contrazione a causa di questo improvviso crollo delle importazioni, ma le conseguenze sono molto più gravi per i Paesi esportatori. L'esito non è positivo per nessun Paese, quindi c'è una sola scelta da fare: negoziare o perdere. Se gli altri Paesi non riusciranno a stabilire accordi commerciali con gli Stati Uniti nel futuro prossimo, i loro rivenditori al dettaglio rischiano di dover affrontare una grave crisi.

____________________________________________________________________________________

da Zerohedge

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/la-fine-della-globalizzazione)

Il fine settimana scorso i policymaker occidentali hanno lanciato un messaggio chiaro: il mondo è di fronte alla fine dell'era della globalizzazione. Isabel Schnabel della BCE lo ha sottolineato in un discorso ai leader aziendali in Italia sabato scorso, quando ha affermato che “il Giorno della Liberazione non è stato liberatorio, ma ha segnato la fine del libero scambio globale”.

Allo stesso modo il primo ministro britannico, Keir Starmer, terrà un discorso più tardi oggi in cui dirà che la globalizzazione ha “fallito” come modello economico e che il suo tempo è ormai finito.

Tali commenti sono tanto sconcertanti per la loro sincerità e gravità, quanto invece per la loro inaspettatezza. Giovedì e venerdì della scorsa settimana, i mercati azionari erano in caduta libera, mentre l'annuncio dei dazi ha rapidamente smorzato le tensioni commerciali di Trump e i mercati hanno preso coscienza che non si trattava solo di una manovra negoziale e che i dazi stavano davvero prendendo piede.

Il governo cinese ha annunciato che avrebbe reagito imponendo dazi del 34% su tutte le importazioni dagli Stati Uniti, mentre i funzionari europei hanno affermato che avrebbero innalzato nuove barriere commerciali per impedire il dumping di beni a basso costo che distruggerebbe l'industria europea, mentre preparavano anche delle “contromisure” contro i dazi statunitensi.

I membri del gabinetto di Trump non hanno fatto nulla durante il fine settimana per placare i timori di ulteriori cali del mercato. Il Segretario al commercio, Lutnick, ha insistito sul fatto che “i dazi stanno arrivando” e il Segretario di stato, Marco Rubio, ha scrollato le spalle di fronte alle perdite dei mercati affermando: “Non credo sia giusto dire che le economie stanno crollando. I mercati stanno scendendo perché si basano sul valore delle azioni di aziende che oggi sono integrate in modi di produzione che sono dannosi per gli Stati Uniti”. In sintesi: non ci interessa il vostro portafoglio, stiamo rendendo l'America di nuovo grande. Come ho osservato alla fine della scorsa settimana: “Rendere l'America di nuovo grande significa rendere l'America di nuovo un'economia basata sulla produzione”.

Senza cavalieri in armatura scintillante del governo pronti a salvare i mercati azionari, i futures di questa mattina sono in forte ribasso. L'indice S&P 500 sembra destinato ad aprire in ribasso del 3,8% e i futures sul NASDAQ indicano una perdita del 4,9% in apertura. Anche i mercati asiatici sono in difficoltà. Il Nikkei è in calo dell'8% e l'ASX200, fortemente legato alla Cina, ha perso il 5,90% al momento della stesura di questo articolo. La FED potrebbe intervenire con un po' di liquidità a basso costo?

Il Brent è sceso del 3,40% questa mattina a $63,33, dopo il calo del 6,42% di giovedì e di un ulteriore 6,50% venerdì. Nonostante il suo status di bene rifugio, l'oro è trattato poco sotto i $3000 l'oncia (liquidato per soddisfare le richieste di margine altrove?), ma ha trovato un po' di interesse nelle prime ore di lunedì, in seguito alla notizia che la Cina aveva incrementato le sue riserve auree statali per il quinto mese consecutivo. I rendimenti dei titoli del Tesoro statunitensi a 10 anni sono ora scesi al 3,92% (e in calo). Questa dovrebbe essere una buona notizia per il Segretario al Tesoro, Scott Bessent, che ha il compito di rifinanziare circa $25.000 miliardi di debito nei prossimi quattro anni.

Bessent ha ribadito la tesi di Rubio secondo cui “i mercati azionari non sono l'economia”, affermando di non aspettarsi una recessione negli Stati Uniti quest'anno e suggerendo che i tassi d'interesse bassi e i prezzi dell'energia fossero in realtà un'ottima notizia per le imprese americane. Ha anche fatto commenti interessanti nel podcast di Tucker Carlson, dove ha affermato che l'88% del mercato azionario statunitense è detenuto dal 10% più ricco degli americani, il 12% è detenuto dal successivo 40% e che il 50% più povero delle famiglie non possiede praticamente nulla, ma è invece indebitato.

Bessent ha affermato che sono proprio queste persone, quelle nel 50% più povero, ad aver bisogno di aiuto, quindi, ancora una volta, il sottinteso è: “Non ci interessa il vostro portafoglio azionario. Ci interessa ricostruire la base manifatturiera americana e, con essa, la classe media operaia”.

.@SecScottBessent: "The old system wasn't working and if you look at a system that's not working you have to be brave to change it ... It would've been easy to keep pumping up the economy, borrowing a lot of money, creating gov't jobs ... but you were going to end up in a… pic.twitter.com/NI5dZXF5Dt

Il gestore di hedge fund, Bill Ackman, sta facendo notizia oggi, descrivendo i dazi come un “inverno nucleare economico” e chiedendo una “pausa” di 90 giorni prima della loro attuazione. I funzionari dell'amministrazione Trump sostengono che oltre 50 Paesi si siano offerti di riformare le proprie pratiche commerciali in cambio di una riduzione dei dazi annunciati.

Taiwan si è offerta di azzerare tutti i dazi sulle importazioni di beni statunitensi e di iniziare a investire di più negli Stati Uniti. Anche il Vietnam si è offerto di azzerare i dazi sulle importazioni statunitensi, ma il consigliere commerciale della Casa Bianca, Peter Navarro, ha respinto l'offerta affermando che non è sufficiente a colmare il persistente squilibrio commerciale a causa di tutti gli “imbrogli commerciali” in corso.

Naturalmente molti economisti e leader mondiali si sono indignati per la rozza semplicità dei dazi reciproci, che apparentemente sono stati calcolati prendendo la bilancia commerciale di ciascun Paese con gli Stati Uniti, dividendola per le esportazioni e poi dividendo per due. Molti economisti hanno sottolineato che i dazi non “massimizzano il benessere economico” perché creano perdite secche e che la Teoria ricardiana del commercio afferma che esso verrebbe massimizzato se ogni economia non avesse barriere commerciali e si specializzasse in base al vantaggio comparato.

Il problema è che la Teoria ricardiana del commercio afferma anche che non dovrebbero verificarsi squilibri commerciali persistenti (perché i tassi di cambio dovrebbero aggiustarsi per impedirli) e presuppone che sia il lavoro che il capitale non siano mobili a livello internazionale. Chiaramente questo non è il caso nel mondo reale e lo status del dollaro come valuta di riserva ha fatto sì che rimanesse sopravvalutato rispetto alle altre valute, ostacolando così la competitività commerciale degli Stati Uniti. Non è un caso che la svalutazione artificiale di varie valute rispetto al dollaro sia una delle principali lamentele di Navarro e Trump, quindi tenete d'occhio il cambio USD/CNY questa settimana e qualsiasi annuncio da parte della PBOC di abbassare il tasso reverse-repo.

Dal punto di vista degli americani, quello che sta succedendo ora è che i Paesi di tutto il mondo che hanno praticato silenziosamente un ampio protezionismo dove faceva loro comodo, stanno convertendosi in punto di morte al libero scambio. Adam Smith è tornato di moda, ma dato che gli Stati Uniti stanno adottando queste politiche protezionistiche per ricostruire la propria base manifatturiera nel caso in cui dovessero combattere di nuovo una guerra importante, i recenti convertiti sembrano dimenticare questa piccola perla di Smith: “La difesa è molto più importante dell'opulenza”.

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

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One of the most insidious ideologies of our time is Marxism. Its proponents use Marxism to undermine our political and social institutions. They dismiss ordinary morality as a tool to cover up exploitation and oppression. They claim that capitalism exploits workers and that it should be replaced by socialism, even though socialist and communist regimes have killed millions of people. We must arm ourselves against this devil’s brew. For that reason, it’s essential that we study what the two greatest social thinkers and defenders of freedom, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, have said about it. That way we will be prepared to battle against the forces of evil.

Marx said that capitalism pushes down workers’ wages until they barely provide enough money to live on. In fact, as Mises points out, capitalism results in a vast improvement of the workers’ standard of living. Mises says: “What really destroyed Marx was his idea of the progressive impoverishment of the workers. Marx didn’t see that the most important characteristic of capitalism was large-scale production for the needs of the masses; the main objective of capitalists is to produce for the broad masses. Nor did Marx see that under capitalism the customer is always right. In his capacity as a wage earner, the worker cannot determine what is to be made. But in his capacity as a customer, he is really the boss and tells his boss, the entrepreneur, what to do. His boss must obey the orders of the workers as they are members of the buying public. Mrs. Webb, like other socialists, was the daughter of a well-to-do businessman. Like other socialists, she thought her father was an autocrat who gave orders to everybody. She didn’t see that he was subject to the sovereignty of the orders of the customers on the market. The ‘great’ Mrs. Webb [Beatrice Potter] was no smarter than the dumbest messenger boy who sees only that his boss gives orders.” [Mrs. Webb was a leading member of the Fabian Society. She and her husband wrote a defense of Stalinism called Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.]

How do Marxists cope with the fact that Marx’s claim that capitalism drives down wages to bare subsistence is false? As Murray Rothbard points out, they do so by changing what Marx claimed. He was really doing something else besides saying what has turned out to be false. They keep doing this when their new interpretation of what Marx was saying also turns out to be false: “Thus, when Marxian predictions fail, even though they are allegedly derived from scientific laws of history,  Marxists go to great lengths to change the terms of the original prediction. A notorious example is Marx’s law of the impoverishment of the working class under capitalism. When it became all too clear that the standard of living of the workers under industrial capitalism was rising instead of falling Marxists fell back on the view that what Marx ‘really’ meant by impoverishment was not immiseration but relative deprivation. One of the problems with this fallback defense is that impoverishment is supposed to be the motor of the proletarian revolution, and it is difficult to envision the workers resorting to bloody revolution because they only enjoy one yacht apiece while capitalists enjoy five or six. Another notorious example was the response of many Marxists to Bohm-Bawerk’s conclusive demonstration that that labor theory of value could not account for the pricing of goods under capitalism. Again, the fallback response was that what Marx “really” meant was not to explain market pricing at all, but merely to assert that labor hours embed some sort of mystically inherent ‘values’ into goods that are, however, irrelevant to the workings of the capitalist market. If this were true, then it i! difficult to see why Marx labored for a great part of his life in an unsuccessful attempt to complete Capital and to solve the value-price problem.”

Marxist socialists want to overthrow capitalism and replace it with central planning. But Mises proved in an article in 1920 that it is impossible for socialism to work. In order to know what to produce, the planners would have to be able to calculate with money prices. Without money prices, they couldn’t tell which of their investments were successful. But money prices exist only under capitalism. Without them, a socialist economy would inevitably collapse into chaos. Mises gives a brief summary of his argument here: “Without economic calculation there can be no economy. Hence, in a socialist state wherein the pursuit of economic calculation is impossible, there can be—in our sense of the term—no economy whatsoever. In trivial and secondary matters rational conduct might still be possible, but in general it would be impossible to speak of rational production anymore. There would be no means of determining what was rational, and hence it is obvious that production could never be directed by economic considerations. What this means is clear enough, apart from its effects on the supply of commodities. Rational conduct would be divorced from the very ground which is its proper domain. Would there, in fact, be any such thing as rational conduct at all, or, indeed, such a thing as rationality and logic in thought itself? Historically, human rationality is a development of economic life. Could it then obtain when divorced therefrom?”

In spite of this, Marxists try to undermine our institutions. Maybe it would be better to say because of this. They love destruction and want to bring down our world in ruins. Murray Rothbard argued that this will to destruction is an expression of a messianic religion that teaches the present world must be destroyed in a violent revolution before a communist millennium can be established: “The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly trite and banal statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, and culture, yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial focus, far more central than the class struggle, the dialectic, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for pre-millennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth. In messianic religious movements, the millennium is invariably established by a mighty, violent upheaval, an Armageddon, a great apocalyptic war between good and evil. After this titanic conflict, a millennium, a new age, of peace and harmony, of the reign of justice, will be installed upon the earth. Marx emphatically rejected those utopian socialists who sought to arrive at communism through a gradual and evolutionary process, through a steady advancement of the good. Instead, Marx harked back to the apocalyptics, the post-millennia coercive German and Dutch Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, to the millennia1 sects during the English Civil War, and to the various groups of pre-millennial Christians who foresaw a bloody Armageddon at the last days, before the millennium could be established. Indeed, since the apoca- lyptic post-mils refused to wait for a gradual goodness and sainthood to permeate mankind, they joined the pre-mils in believing that only a violent apocalyptic final struggle between good and evil, between saints and sinners, could usher in the millennium. Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx’s version, to be made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the inevitable instrument for the advent of his millennium, communism. In fact, Marx, like the pre-mils (or ‘millenarians’), went further to hold that the reign of evil on earth would reach a peak just before the apocalypse (‘the darkness before the dawn’).

Let’s do everything we can to educate people so that they fully understand how dangerous and Satanic Marxism really is!

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Every civilization is built upon a myth. Not a fiction, but a frame—a sacred narrative that defines the borders of good and evil, maps the structure of the world, and carves meaning into the chaos of time. For the modern West, that myth is the Second World War.

We do not merely study that war; we worship it. It is the holy text of the present order, the last moral certainty in an otherwise relativistic age. The world we inhabit was birthed in its ashes, and our institutions, both supranational and domestic, trace their legitimacy to its outcome. Our moral reflexes, our political taboos, and our cultural self-image each flow from the narrative established in the aftermath of that conflict. It is the one story every schoolchild knows by heart, the one event in which history is always taught with the verdict already rendered, where objectivity is not merely discouraged but actively punished. Above all, it is a moral fable: a tale of Good overcoming Evil, of light prevailing over darkness, of universal brotherhood triumphing over the tribal instincts of blood and soil.

But it is not history; it is myth in the most destructive sense of the word, not a noble fiction that elevates a people, but a sacred distortion that imprisons them. It has become, in effect, a new religion. And like all true religions, it governs not only belief, but morality, identity, and destiny.

Nietzsche wrote that God is dead, not as provocation but as diagnosis. He did not mean that the divine had vanished, but that the metaphysical architecture which once upheld Western life, the shared horizon of meaning and the sacred order of value, had collapsed. What followed was not freedom but vacancy. The Second World War did not reverse this decline; it cemented it. In its aftermath, modern Western man, cut off from tradition and denied transcendence, became vulnerable to new idols. As Heidegger warned, the loss of Being would drive man toward technics, abstraction, and collective illusions, giving rise to an age in which truth is displaced by narrative and destiny is reduced to management.

It was in this vacuum that the myth of the Good War arose, not merely as historical interpretation but as surrogate transcendence. It began as myth but did not remain myth. It became the sacred event of a post-Christian West, the Passion narrative of a secular faith. Sin was redefined as ancestral pride, salvation as submission, and the highest moral ideal became the erasure of distinction, since distinction is the foundation of identity, and identity the recognition of difference. The West unmoored itself from its gods and raised a new religion in their place.

Within this creed, the Second World War is remembered not as a geopolitical conflict, but as a holy war. According to the myth, the war was fought to liberate the world from tyranny, racism, and barbarism. It was a righteous crusade to stop a madman bent on planetary conquest, racial extermination, and totalitarian rule. In this telling, the Allies become selfless guardians of peace and justice, defenders of the weak, liberators of the oppressed, and champions of universal dignity.

What is left untold, what is buried or ignored, is the record of Soviet mass murder, the incineration of entire cities by firebombing, and the systematic rape of millions of women by victorious armies. These details are either omitted or minimized because the moral arc must remain unbroken, and the myth demands that the victors be pure, untarnished, beyond reproach. The enemy, in contrast, must be absolute—not merely defeated, but demonized, rendered metaphysically evil, so that the cause against him may be remembered as absolutely good.

And thus a devil was fashioned—a single man transfigured into a supernatural emblem of madness, hatred, and genocide. He is no longer treated as a historical figure but as a totem of eternal sin, a symbol summoned to silence dissent and to terrify those who stray from orthodoxy. To question immigration policy, to express loyalty to one’s race, to observe demographic change with unease is enough to invite his ghost. The Nazi, whether real or imagined, is now the eternal enemy of the modern order—not a threat to nations, but to the abstract idea of equality upon which the postwar West has staked its soul.

Here emerges the second foundational myth, inseparable from the first: the myth that all human beings are equal, not only in dignity before the law or under God, but in cognitive capacity, temperament, moral instinct, and creative potential. It insists that race, sex, culture, and nation are illusions or social constructs, that history and biology are hateful inventions, and that all observable disparities must be explained not by difference, but by oppression. This myth is not offered as aspiration or principle, but as absolute truth, one that demands unwavering faith even in the face of empirical evidence, daily experience, and common sense. To notice difference is to commit a kind of blasphemy; to act upon it is treated as a moral crime.

The two myths reinforce each other in a mutually sustaining loop. The myth of the Good War provides the moral alibi for the myth of equality, while the myth of equality breathes contemporary meaning into the memory of the war. We are told that millions died to prove a single moral proposition: that there are no enduring distinctions among peoples, that all are interchangeable, and that pride, borders, and identity are preludes to catastrophe. Because this double myth is the foundation of the current regime, it cannot be questioned. If the war was not about the triumph of universal values, if the enemy was not uniquely evil, then the entire postwar order is exposed as illegitimate—a revelation that those in power cannot afford to permit.

But the truth is simpler and far more tragic. The war was not a global moral awakening, but a clash of empires, a continuation of unresolved struggles from the century prior, and the culmination of a European Civil War, a fratricidal brother-war waged with unprecedented cruelty by every side involved. Its causes lay in diplomatic treachery, ideological extremism, and territorial ambition. Its consequences were not peace and liberty, but division, famine, occupation, and the subjugation of half of Europe, the seedbed of Western man, behind the barbed wire of a new tyranny. The war did not inaugurate a new era of freedom. It marked the collapse of Western self-confidence, the twilight of its spiritual vitality, and the beginning of its long moral disintegration.

In the decades that followed, the peoples of Europe and their descendants abroad were taught not to cherish their heritage, but to apologize for it. Every expression of loyalty to tradition, to ancestry, to historical continuity, has been recast as dangerous. Every appeal to order, hierarchy, or cultural memory is now met with the same panicked refrain: “This is how it starts.” You are told you are Hitler. You are dangerous. You must be silenced. The myth, in other words, does not protect; it punishes. It does not inspire; it cripples. It tells European man that he may exist only as a penitent, that his past is a burden, and that his future must consist of demographic erasure, racial replacement, and the deafening silence of total submission.

In this moral framework, pride is forbidden. Not aggression, not supremacy, but pride itself, the simple and natural feeling of belonging to something ancient, beautiful, and one’s own. That alone is now impermissible for the White man. All other peoples are allowed such sentiment; indeed, they are encouraged to cultivate it. But he is told to disown himself, to forget his dead, and to welcome his own disappearance as a moral duty.

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There were quite a lot of what Donald Trump might describe as “bad things” taking place in Washington over the past week, to include the worsening of relations with China shortly after what appeared to be an agreement had been reached over tariffs; the arrival at an apparent impasse in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program; and friction with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over possible initiatives relating to the genocide that is continuing in Gaza.

The pointless break with China, tweeted by Trump as follows: “The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” will have potentially major consequences for the US economy. However, perhaps the most lethal cross-talking of the past week relates to Russia and Ukraine, where the demands by President Donald Trump to initiate a ceasefire have been met by a Russian reiteration of its redline national security imperatives to include no Ukrainian entry into NATO, acceptance that Crimea is part of Russia, and either autonomy or incorporation into Russia of the Russian ethnic oblasts in the eastern part of Ukraine.

This has led to a considerable cooling in the bilateral relationship between Moscow and Washington and it also suggests that Trump’s apparent desire to disengage from Ukraine has now taken on a Neoconnish tone with the United States presuming that it must be the accepted hegemon which by rights should be calling the shots on what might come next. And Trump is not above issuing ill-advised new personal threats against Russian President Vladimir Putin whom he described as “absolutely crazy,” as well as a warning that even stronger Treasury Department sanctions targeting Russia are being considered. He angrily tweeted “What Vladimir Putin does not realize is that, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!” Trump’s son Donald Jr also threw into the mix a bit of Memorial Day context that well illustrates the vacuousness of the foreign policy thinking in the White House. Trump Jr, who apparently is being considered by some a possible candidate to succeed his father, tweeted on Trump Sr’s inane observation with his own take on the situation: “As we drove past the rows of white grave markers [at Arlington Cemetery], in the gravity of the moment…I also thought of…all the sacrifices we’d have to make—giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals.”

I don’t recall that either Trump ever put himself in harm’s way by serving in the US military. So much for sacrifices. Unfortunately, the clueless President Trump is also being backed up by some Europeans who, for reasons that are largely incomprehensible, seem to want to go to war with Russia. Germany has recently decided share their military technology to help Ukraine develop and build long range missiles that some believe might have to be initially operated and targeted by German military personnel, which Putin has said will be considered an act of war on the part of Berlin. He has suggested that he would respond to any attack on or near Moscow using those missiles fired from Ukraine with a counter-strike on the German capital. Some observers are warning that World War 3 could be a result of that kind of tit-for-tat.

The situation with Iran and Israel also seems to be on the verge of erupting into something much worse, possibly to include a regional escalation that could literally explode. If one can make a judgement based on the ranting by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as interpreted by many in the Israeli media, it would seem that Israel is preparing to interfere with US-Iranian talks by attacking so-called nuclear and military targets in Iran with the expectation that the US will be drawn into the conflict with little resistance from Trump, who in turn is being pressured by a large majority in Congress that is keen on “protecting” Israel. The Congressional demand is particularly ironic as it is Israel that is now and always been the aggressor throughout its region. It is also the lone nuclear power, with nutcases like Zionist Congressman Randy Fine of Florida already calling for “nuking” Gaza in the wake of the recent killing of the two Israeli Embassy officials in Washington.

Fine is only one of the many voices raised in unison to permit Israel to carry out hideous crimes that would not be acceptable if they were initiated by any other country. The Israel Lobby in the US has the power to silence nearly all dissent, as one might note from the Trump law enforcement’s full scale attack on protesters, mostly students. Those protesting have been demonstrating against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, something which Netanyahu and his ghastly array of murderer-associates do not even make any effort to conceal.

Deportations of foreign students who are appalled by what Israel is doing has been the policy, but more recently it has been expanded to include denying visas to many other students requiring the papers to study in the US. The State Department, which issues the documents, has been tasked with demanding access to potential students’ social media so they can be checked for undesirable content. Now that China is no longer considered a friend, Chinese students are being particularly investigated due to concerns that they might be spies stealing American industrial secrets.

The list of undesirable students is inevitably top heavy with any who have demonstrated against Israel or any who have supported attempts to “boycott, divest from or sanction” (BDS) Israel and its activities. Trump and his staff have repeatedly indicated that the objective is to get rid of foreign students who engage in “antisemitism, pro-Hamas support, or hatred of the United States” and his Administration has now demanded from Harvard and other colleges and universities records that identify all foreign students in the US on education visas to include information on what countries they come from. That means that not all countries will be regarded as equal under the new guidelines.

The witch hunt on foreign students will no doubt grow as there is little within the US government system but for some toothless muttering from the judiciary that would attempt to stop it. Interestingly, however, the way the war on demonstrators is being pursued supports the views of an increasing number of Americans who have negative views of Israel not only because of its war crimes but also due to its virtual control of many aspects of US foreign and national security policy. If Israel persists in its killing of babies that anger will grow, particularly if the United States is dragged into greater killing in Iran, Yemen and Palestine as an accomplice to the slaughter and as the protector of Israel after it does its dirty work. Indeed, Trump is fully on board to removing the Palestinians from what was once Palestine and Netanyahu totally endorses that agenda.

And the special status of the Israelis vis-à-vis the US government and media will become more and more evident as efforts are made to engage in a massive cover-up to protect the Israelis that pretends that the going to war is really in the national interest of the United States. That will mean fixing things so Israel suffers no damage from the consequences of its own actions. An interesting recent article described the plight of Israeli students at Harvard, who are currently subject to the same scrutiny as their fellow foreign nationals at the university, all of whom will reportedly lose their State Department student visas due to the college’s alleged failure to comply with White House demands. There are a reported 160 such students, a considerable portion of which consists of former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, which means that they may have been party to the actual war crimes and human rights violations that are the source of the world’s negative perception of the Jewish state. Surely, the Trump Administration will jump in to protect these wonderful human beings so I rather suspect that there will soon be legislation that exempts Israeli students in the US from the consequences that the other foreign students are currently confronting. You can bet on it!

And so we have another week in Washington, full of bombast and misrepresentation of facts as the world crumbles around it. Only three years and five more months to go until the next presidential election! If we make it that far!

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

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There are two types of evidence in criminal cases — direct evidence and circumstantial evidence. Direct evidence comes in the form of things like confessions, admissions, or eyewitness testimony. Circumstantial evidence comes in the form of indirect evidence.

For people who believe only in direct evidence, they will never accept the fact that the U.S. military-intelligence establishment orchestrated and carried out the assassination of President Kennedy. That’s because there is no direct evidence that has ever surfaced establishing the guilt of the national-security establishment in the assassination. Such people will always fall within the group of people who lament, “Golly, I guess we just will never know who killed JFK.” People in this group will spend their lives scoffing at the “conspiracy theorists” who have arrived at a different conclusion.

On the other hand, for people like me who believe in the validity of circumstantial evidence, there is now no reasonable doubt but that the U.S. national-security establishment orchestrated and carried out the assassination of President Kennedy.

Let me give you an example of direct evidence and circumstantial evidence. Let’s assume that a witness in a court case testifies that he couldn’t sleep and that he saw it raining all night long.  That’s direct eyewitness evidence that it rained. But let’s assume that he fell asleep instead. The next morning, it isn’t raining but he states that he saw that water was flooding the streets, the lawns were drenched, water was dripping from trees, and nearby streams were overflowing. That is circumstantial — or indirect — evidence that it rained during the night. That evidence can be admitted into a trial, and it is just as valid as direct evidence.

As a former civil and criminal trial attorney, I was trained to think like a lawyer. The more books I read about the Kennedy assassination, the more I became convinced that the military and the CIA were responsible for JFK’s murder. However, I also felt that there simply wasn’t sufficient evidence — direct or circumstantial — to convict beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard of proof used in a criminal case.

There certainly wasn’t any direct evidence in the form of a confession or an admission of guilt in some long-secret memorandum. And while there was a lot of circumstantial evidence of guilt, it simply wasn’t enough, I felt, to convince a jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Everything changed for me when I read Douglas Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. As I finished reading Horne’s book, I now knew that the national-security establishment had orchestrated and carried out the assassination. No, not by direct evidence but rather by circumstantial evidence.

Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990s, firmly established beyond a reasonable doubt that the military conducted a fraudulent autopsy on JFK’s body on the very night of the assassination. Why does that matter? Because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy being carried out on the body of the president. Once one concludes that the autopsy was fraudulent, one cannot help but conclude that the military-intelligence establishment is guilty of the president’s murder. There is simply no way around it.

I set forth the evidence surrounding the fraudulent autopsy in my book The Kennedy Autopsy, which is essentially a short, easy-to-read synopsis of Horne’s five-volume book. Let me give you just one example of what I’m talking about when I use the word “fraud.”

The physicians who treated JFK at Parkland Hospital steadfastly maintained that he had a massive exit-sized hole in the lower back of his head. They weren’t the only ones. So did nurses who were inside the treating room. So did a Secret Service agent. So did a newsman outside Parkland. In fact, so did two FBI agents at Bethesda Hospital, where the military conducted its autopsy on a top-secret basis. Their evidence constituted direct, eyewitness evidence that there was a massive-exit-sized hole in the lower back of Kennedy’s head. That direct evidence was later corroborated by circumstantial evidence provided by a Navy film expert in Washington, a Navy chief petty officer named Saundra Spencer, who developed, on a top-secret, classified basis, post-mortem autopsy photographs of the president at the Navy photographic center in Washington, D.C. Her sworn testimony before the ARRB in the 1990s established that the autopsy photographs she developed showed a big, exit-sized hole in the back of the president’s head, just as the Dallas eyewitnesses had stated.

A great documentary to watch is JFK: What the Doctors Saw. Or just watch this interview of Dr. Robert McClellan, who was one of the treating physicians at Parkland. Go to 6:05 to watch McClelland describing the massive hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. McClelland is now deceased but for the rest of his life, he never wavered in what he witnessed that fateful afternoon.

Just recently, in the halls of Congress, Dr. Donald Curtis, who I think is now the only physician who treated Kennedy who is still alive, gave sworn testimony before the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. Ironically, Doug Horne gave sworn testimony at the same hearing.

Curtis’s testimony is summarized in an excellent article posted today entitled “The Double Significance of Dr. Curtis” by a lawyer and JFK assassination researcher named Lawrence P. Schapf. Snapf writes, “Dr. Curtis told Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, chair of the the task force, that as he stood next to the president’s left leg, he saw Dr. Clark lift the president’s head and call over each of the department heads to show them the fatal head wound, so that they could see for themselves why he had stopped the resuscitation. Curtis said they all got a good look at the head wound. He remembers Dr. Clark mentioning the cerebellum several times. The cerebellum is inside the lower rear portion of the skull and is key to motor functions.”

So, what’s the problem? The problem is that an official military autopsy photograph shows the back of JFK’s head to be fully intact — that is, no big, exit-sized hole in the back of JFK’s head. Thus, if what all those eyewitnesses stated is true and correct, then that military photograph has to be fraudulent. There is no way around it.

For me, as a lawyer, the direct evidence of all those eyewitnesses, including some of the most competent, honest physicians in the country, is so overwhelming and persuasive that there is only one reasonable conclusion that can be drawn — the military’s autopsy photograph is false and fraudulent.

Moreover, that’s only one part of the overall autopsy fraud. The other parts, including two different brain examinations that were carried out as part of the autopsy that autopsy physicians claimed was only one brain examination, are detailed in my book and Horne’s book.

Once one reaches the conclusion that the military’s autopsy was fraudulent, that necessarily leads to a much bigger conclusion — guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment in the assassination itself. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None! A fraudulent autopsy is conclusive circumstantial evidence of guilt on the part of the military-intelligence establishment in the assassination of President Kennedy. There is simply no way around it.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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The U.S. President is performing one of his usual stunts:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump – May 30, 2025, 12:09 UTC

…
I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen. Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!! The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!

Trump’s take is, of course, nonsense. But to see that one has to take a step back.

Trump had raised absurdly high tariffs against China which then had responded in kind. Additional hostile measures imposed by the U.S. were targeting China’s import and production of semiconductors.

In response China limited the export of products for which it holds a monopoly. These are mainly rare-earth elements and magnets produced with them. While these are rather small items trade-wise they are needed to make modern electrical motors and are thus a significant part of the supply chain for higher level production items.

The high tariffs on products from China threatened to lead to empty shelves in U.S. markets. The financial markets were concerned. The U.S. dollar, stocks markets and treasuries decreased in price. A financial crisis was developing.  Trump had to pull back.

On May 11 the U.S. and Chinese trade representative met in Geneva. In a Joint Statement they agreed on a pull back from high tariffs and to pause other trade related measures. The preamble of the deal is making the most important points:

The Government of the United States of America (the “United States”) and the Government of the People’s Republic of China (“China”),

Recognizing the importance of their bilateral economic and trade relationship to both countries and the global economy;

Recognizing the importance of a sustainable, long-term, and mutually beneficial economic and trade relationship;

Reflecting on their recent discussions and believing that continued discussions have the potential to address the concerns of each side in their economic and trade relationship; and

Moving forward in the spirit of mutual opening, continued communication, cooperation, and mutual respect;

The Parties commit to take the following actions by May 14, 2025:

Both sides reduced their tariffs. China also promised to reduce some of its non tariff measures:

China will [..] adopt all necessary administrative measures to suspend or remove the non-tariff countermeasures taken against the United States since April 2, 2025.

The financial markets relaxed and everyone was happy about it.

But on May 14, the very same day the new rules were to apply, the U.S. introduced new and extremely harsh measures against Chinese products:

The US Commerce Department issued guidance stating that the use of Huawei Technologies Co’s Ascend artificial intelligence (AI) chips “anywhere in the world” violates the government’s export controls, escalating US efforts to curb technological advances in China.The agency’s Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement on Tuesday that it is also planning to warn the public about “the potential consequences of allowing US AI chips to be used for training and inference of Chinese AI models”.

While this may not have been a technical breach of the Geneva agreement it certainly violated the spirit of the agreed upon Joint Statement:

Barely a week into a U.S.-China truce in their long-running trade war, Beijing has accused Washington of violating the temporary agreement reached in Geneva.

The Chinese Commerce Ministry said on Monday that the U.S. was taking “discriminatory measures” against China, after the U.S. Commerce Department recently warned American businesses to avoid Chinese-made microchips, specifically those produced by Chinese tech giant Huawei.

Both countries have walked back a series of punitive actions against the other as part of a 90-day pause agreed at the recent talks in Switzerland after U.S. President Donald Trump had imposed heavy tariffs. A consultation mechanism was created to discuss their wide-ranging trade disagreements, but the scope of the special channel may now be under dispute.

The Chinese government’s strongly worded pushback against sustained U.S. industrial policy in emerging and critical technologies—such as advanced computer chips fueling the race for AI supremacy—suggests the deep-rooted economic security concerns present in both camps will not be easily addressed despite agreements on paper.

China demanded that the U.S. “correct its mistakes“. As the U.S. made not attempt to do so China slow walked (archived) the lifting of export restrictions on rare-earth metals and on magnets made thereof:

On May 12, the countries announced after weekend meetings in Geneva that they would suspend most of their recently imposed tariffs. Since then, however, both governments have shown that they are still prepared to wield controls over critical exports as weapons against one another, with moves that are potentially even more damaging to trade and global supply chains.

China has restricted its exports of rare earth magnets, which are crucial for cars, semiconductors, aircraft and many other applications. Close to 90 percent of the world’s rare earth metals, including magnets, are produced in China.

And the United States on May 13 banned the latest semiconductors from Huawei, a Chinese electronics giant. Then on Wednesday, President Trump suspended the shipment of American semiconductors and some aerospace equipment needed for China’s commercial aircraft, the C919, a signature project in China’s push toward economic self-reliance.
…
Last week, Ford Motor temporarily closed a factory in Chicago that makes Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles after one of its suppliers ran out of the magnets. In most new cars, the magnets are used in dozens of electric motors that operate brake and steering systems, fuel injectors and even power seats.

On Monday, China granted some export licenses for rare earth magnets to be shipped to the United States and Europe, …
…
Several companies in Europe, including Volkswagen, were granted permission by Beijing to continue procuring rare earth magnets soon after China began enforcing export controls on them in April. American companies have been juggling factory schedules, reassigning their dwindling magnet supplies to continue making their most profitable products.

China asserts that the U.S. is in breech of the Geneva agreement. As the U.S. introduced new non-tariff barriers against Chinese products China has stopped to lift its own non-tariff measures against the export of products the U.S. needs.

Trump’s claim that China “HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US” is obfuscating the fact that the U.S. was the first to violate its commitments.

This again proves that the U.S. is non-agreement-capable (недоговороспособны (archived)).

Anyone dealing with it is well advised to always keep measures in hand that can be used to compel adherence to whatever agreement is made.

China, like Russia, Iran and others, has long learned that.

So what is Mr. NICE GUY going to do about that?

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post Trump Accuses China ff Violating Agreement He Did Not Adhere to appeared first on LewRockwell.

Americans may not have as many rituals as some other people do, but we have some. One of those is graduation, symbolizing the transition from one stage of life to another and a celebration of a young person’s accomplishments. (We may actually overdo these, as what was once a transition from college and high school studies is now often celebrated from even pre-nursery school. Still, it plays a significant part in life, structuring time and change.) Parents and grandparents who sat through boring recitals, sports events, prize days, supported kids dealing with difficult interpersonal issues, hard courses, college admission hurdles, and sacrificed to pay the cost of schooling can now cheer (or mourn) that those activities are now over.

For all the relatives’ work, they now get to sit in hot, muggy weather on uncomfortable folding chairs and listen to a variety of speakers selected who knows how. I’m old enough to remember when, at worst, we heard boring, anodyne speeches to graduates about making your mark, improving the world, and sharing the blessings of your newly acquired knowledge with a world desperate for the pearls of newly acquired knowledge. Maybe a few dumb jokes were thrown in. Then everyone got their diplomas and headed for the nearest bar.

In recent years, graduations have become stages for performative, divisive screeds at a largely captive audience. You don’t have to tolerate this. Years ago, I walked out in the middle of some of these speeches at very fine universities, Duke and UCLA law school. I’m not sure the even more offensive ceremonies these days would lure me to stay seated for more than 10 minutes.

You needn’t play prisoner to this nonsense even if you loved your graduate. In fact, if you are ahead of the game in their senior year, you might make it clear to the schools that you expect respectful and non-divisive speakers, or you will walk out, even at the risk of disrupting the ceremony.

At Duke, when I walked out, the speakers chose to alienate the audience by promoting pro-Palestinian nonsense, and at UCLA, in an audience of mostly poor immigrant parents whose children had succeeded in law school, the speaker who rankled me complained there weren’t enough black students in the class. (Should UCLA have refused to admit meritorious Vietnamese and Eastern European first-generation American students whose parents, at substantial risk, fled here from oppression with nothing and no one to help them, to make room for lesser-qualified applicants?)

Highlighted this week are speakers at various Ivies, but it was a typical pattern in many colleges and universities where the psychological and social meaning of the ritual was debased and the participants insulted and abused. I surely haven’t documented all the outrageous behavior, but it’s widespread enough to see how ubiquitous the move is to deprive deserving students and those who love them of a traditional ritual of passage.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia

In her Harvard graduation speech, Indian American student Shruthi Kumar stood with pro-Gaza, pro-Palestine protesters.

At the Harvard Kennedy School, “the elected class speaker used his time to talk about Palestine and Harvard’s complicity in the ongoing Nakba… ‘While we celebrate our graduation, Harvard University, threatened by the student uprising for Palestinian liberation, has chosen to withhold degrees from our peers who have not only fulfilled every graduation requirement, but more importantly who have exemplified veritas through their dissent.’”

A Yale graduate disrupted the diploma ceremony by loudly chanting “FREE FREE PALESTINE,” as the students echoed the chants in solidarity with Palestine.

Princeton University graduates handed the President a Palestinian flag during their graduation ceremony, protesting the university’s complicity with Israel.

Graduating students at Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work disrupted their ceremony with chants and banners in support of Palestine. “Turn your back on Silberman, all eyes on Palestine!” “PALESTINE WILL FREE US ALL.”

Columbia: Acting president Claire Shipman was greeted by boos, jeers and “Free Mahmoud” shouts, and a number of grads tore up or burned their diplomas to “Free Palestine.”

Read the Whole Article

The post It’s Graduation Time Again appeared first on LewRockwell.

This week I was researching the history of the modern African economy as well as the financial effects of “colonialism”, largely in an effort to discern if Africa is actually better off with or without western influence. One can of course argue that racial divisions like Apartheid in South Africa or segregation in Rhodesia have their own oppressive social effects beyond the financial. There’s also the argument that only “white colonists” ever benefited from the infrastructure they built (which is actually untrue, wherever white colonists were established, everything from water access to roads to medical care improved for everyone).

However, I think it’s fair to ask if these nations were experiencing growth and prosperity under white governance, or if things were relatively the same. We’re not supposed to talk about it – We’re only supposed to say “colonialism bad”. I don’t care about that, I just want to know what the realities are.

In the process I came across an interesting video featuring a black South African man who presented the race issue and the South Africa issue in a way that was simple but it brought impressive clarity. In summary he said:

“Africans are forever chasing the white man.”

The phrase “black fatigue” comes to mind, but again, it’s far more about culture than skin color. It’s something that white people like me aren’t supposed discuss.

Frankly, I find race divisions to be a distraction from the bigger problem, which is elitism and the sabotage of the west from within by wealthy oligarchs so that they can replace it with an authoritarian socialist “Utopia”. That said, I cannot ignore the fact that certain minorities in the US tend to lean majority far left, or that most third world migrants hold socialist ideals.

To be sure, there are millions of white woke liberals helping to fuel this fire, but again, most of the black community is happy to be used. These people become the enemy because they have allowed themselves to be weaponized in the hopes of getting a piece of the western pie before whole thing is ransacked. They don’t want to build for themselves, so, they voluntarily become the barbarians at the gate.

My advice to these people is to stop. Stop chasing the white man. Stop trying to feed off the western world. Put in the effort to construct your own great societies with your own accomplishments. No one is stopping you except yourselves. You are being duped into acting as a battering ram for globalism and multiculturalism; you are a tool for deconstructing the west.

By extension, stop coveting what white people have built within your own communities and start seeing such people as valuable allies in creating something better.

If you try to take from them they will eventually retaliate and it will not be a pretty sight. But, the interesting thing about white people (at least the conservative types) is that they will often help you if you ask nicely. Instead of threatening them, maybe try learning from them? Most white people I know love to improve their communities in any way they can, and they enjoy helping people who want to help themselves.

Instead of seeing white people as the enemy because of historic “crimes” which every single ethnic group has been guilty of, why not look to the future? Of course, this would require people in the third world to abandon their socialist leanings. Far left ideology is a poison that makes nations and cultures weak. It makes them perpetual beggars. To improve one’s future, one must aspire to create, not steal.

Why not stop chasing the white man and work with him instead?

Reprinted with permission from Alt-Market.us.

The post The Third World Is Forever Chasing the White Man appeared first on LewRockwell.

The effort on my part to tell the truth is costly, not merely financially.  The large costs are to my reputation and to my freedom.  For example, some years ago a website called PropOrNot, funded by we-don’t-know-who, perhaps the US Department of State, or US AID, or George Soros, or  Israel, identified me as a “Putin agent/dupe.”  I was designated a “Russian agent” because I asked a simple question:  Is it really in our interest to risk war with Russia, which in all likelihood will end up nuclear, for the sake of Washington’s hegemony?

If one complains of the annihilation of Palestinians and Palestine by the Israelis, one is labeled an “anti-semite” and “Holocaust Denier.”

If one complains about white ethnic America being overrun by immigrant-invaders, one is labeled racist.

And so on.  Hopefully, my readers know the drill.

It is not only my reputation.  Can I risk showing up at an airport and going through TSA?  What is the likelihood that I am on a list?  If Tulsi Gabbard can be harassed by TSA and forced to miss flights while they search her for the third time in a row, what can I expect from DEI hires who find my name on a list?  In America today, I can be denied a flight by a Muslim TSA employee or an immigrant-invader who just walked across the border and was integrated into America with a TSA job.

Think about this for a moment.  A former presidential appointee as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury confirmed in office by the US Senate has no assurance that he will be able to board a US airliner in a US airport.

If I make a trip abroad, will I be harassed on re-entry?

This is the cost of telling the truth.

I sometimes wonder what the value of truth is to most Americans, or perhaps I should say a better approximation to the truth than is available in official narratives.  Most Americans want to hear what they already believe.  When they hear something different it upsets them because it doesn’t fit the framework from which they understand what they mistakenly think is reality. I have found in my life that telling the truth is the best way to make enemies.  That’s why so few people tell the truth.

A person who takes the risk of telling the truth likes to see that there are people who appreciate it.  This site receives no support from the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pew Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, George Soros, US AID, the Israel Lobby, corporations, foreign governments.  This website is financed by monthly donations of who I think are the 5,000 Americans who encouraged me about 15 years ago to continue writing.  They constitute less than 1% of the readership.

So quarterly I reach out to the 99% and ask that they support the website if it serves them, which I assume it does as the website has 2 million readers and 5 million visits annually. At times when I have checked, Word Press has reported that my website is read in every country on planet Earth. In some countries tens of thousands read it; in others three or four people, probably CIA station chiefs.

In a world with nuclear weapons and biolabs busy at work weaponizing viruses or whatever they are, life is precarious.  There is huge worrying on the left about “global warming,” but little about nuclear winter and US biolabs sprinkled all over the world.  Recently, the Trump administration had to stop US funding of the weaponization of bird flu in the Wuhan lab in China.  How was it possible for this funding to exist?  What kind of insanity is ruling over us?

If you look closely, you will see that in the Western World life is no longer viewed as positive, something to be protected. I am not just speaking about abortion. The World Economic Forum, a collection of anti-human elites and Bill Gates, seem committed to reducing human life on Earth from 7 or 8 billion to 500 million.  Perhaps this is why no one in the West is disturbed by Israel’s genocide of Palestine–a mere 2 million–and not only the genocide of the Palestinians but also their country.

Ask yourself, why is your life precarious?  Compare yourself to those on the American frontier in the 19th century.  They are threatened by competent and committed warriors–Apaches, Comanches, Sioux–a real but minuscule threat compared to nuclear war and bioweapons and laboratory prepared and released pandemics. Americans today are far less safe than Americans on the frontier in the 1800s.

This should disturb Americans, but they seem unaware of it.

If you appreciate my efforts to elevate your understanding of our time, show it with a contribution.  It is the only way I have of knowing my efforts are appreciated.

The post Soon Truth Will Be Too Costly To Tell appeared first on LewRockwell.

Israel Has Wiped Out Over 1,000 Entire Families
International Middle East Media Center, 27 May 2025

Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.

For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. And for thinking of that other Child, of whom the poet Luke speaks. The infant was taken up in the arms of an old man, whose tongue grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty.

And the old man spoke; this child is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that is spoken against. Small consolation; a child born to make trouble, and to die for it, the First Jew (not the last) to be subject of a “definitive solution.” He sets up the cross and dies on it; in the Rose Garden of the executive mansion, on the D.C. Mall, in the courtyard of the Pentagon.

That was Father Daniel Berrigan’s statement read in court in October 1968 during the trial of The Catonsville Nine. On May 17th, 1968, with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson presiding over 500,000 + American troops waging war against Vietnam, nine people, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother Father Phillip Berrigan, entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland and removed draft files of those who were about to be sent to Vietnam. They took these files outside and burned them with home-made napalm, a weapon commonly used on civilians by the U.S. forces. They were sentenced to federal prison.

Less than a month after their sentencing, the Republican Richard Nixon was elected U.S. president on a campaign promise that he had a “secret peace plan” to end the U.S. war against Vietnam. He did the opposite, intensified the war, spreading it to Laos and Cambodia, killing millions. He was reelected in 1972 while committing this carnage. He won 49 out of 50 states. The war ended in 1975 with a U.S. defeat.

My name is Aaron Bushnell, and I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

That is the statement of Senior Airman (SRA) Aaron Bushnell, 25 years-old, who martyred himself when he immolated himself outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, 2024, to protest the Israel/U.S genocide of Palestinians. Aaron had previously said: “What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now”

Right now is still now, 16 months later and ongoing.

I am writing this on a piece of paper but you will most probably read it on a screen, the same screens that have provided ample news and views of the burning of Palestinian children in Gaza, another new Land of Burning Children. If you have not seen such pictures, it is because you have turned away in what Jean Paul Sartre called “bad faith,” knowing what they contain and demand of your conscience, but hiding that radicalizing truth from yourself.

Those pictures demand, at the very least, that you condemn and never support those who carry out these atrocities – in the U.S.A. that means Joseph Biden and Donald Trump, first and foremost, neither of whom you can you ever again support by saying he is or was “the lesser of two evils” – just as Martin Luther King, Jr. did when he was jolted by photographs of dead and napalmed Vietnamese children in early 1967 in William Pepper’s Ramparts magazine’s photographic essay, “The Children of Vietnam.”  King was so sickened by the photos that he, against all advice, publicly turned vociferously against the U.S. war against Vietnam, and was therefore assassinated by the U.S. government the following year, one month before the Catonsville protest that was less than three weeks before the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.

If you follow King’s example and reject evil, you will not be assassinated, but you will have redeemed your soul.

Thanks to Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, many know that paper burns at Fahrenheit 451.

But at what temperature do children burn?  Do you need to know?

The history of American presidential politics has often been a tale of the election of “the lesser of two evils.” And that justification has been used time-and-again to support the savage killing of innocent people around the world. The presidential elections of this century tell that story very clearly, just as many decades of history confirm U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing attempts to exterminate the Palestinian people.

The lesser of two evils apologists have been very active in recent years, defending their indefensible politicians.

A good friend of mine, a small monetary contributor to the Democratic party and a consistent voter for Democratic presidential candidates, has long accused me of going easy on Donald Trump. This began during the presidential campaign in 2016, but had its roots previously in my critique of Barack Obama (following that of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) who in the words of the late Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report “may go down in history as the most effective – and deceptive – imperialist of them all.” He wrote this in the foreword to Jeremy Kuzmarov’s searing documentation of Barack Obama’s war crimes of bombing seven Muslim countries, destroying Libya, and engineering a coup d’état in Ukraine, Obama’s Unending Wars. My friend’s opinion is shared by many other friends and extended family members who won’t read my writing. Without saying it, they imply that I am an apologist for Mr. Trump and unfairly oppose the Democratic warmongers, Obama and Biden, whom they consider peace lovers.

Other friends and associates, traditional Democrats, enthusiastically voted for Barack Obama in 2008 after eight years of lies, crackdowns on civil liberties (the Patriot Act, etc.), and the endless savage wars waged by Republican George W. Bush’s criminal administration. The eight prior years of Democrat Bill Clinton’s reversal of economic safeguards for the poor, his endless bombing and sanctions against Iraq resulting in his acceptable deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children, and his destruction of Yugoslavia and the bombing of Serbia, gave them pause, but Bush’s policies were so evil that Obama seemed like a breadth of fresh air in comparison. [Admission: I have voted for one U.S. president in my lifetime – McGovern in 1972.] But soon Obama showed them his true colors and they became disconsolate. And when in 2016 it became apparent that the Democrats, led by Obama and Hillary Clinton conjured up Russiagate to make certain that the reality-TV Trump not get elected but he did, they moved gradually toward Trump’s camp. Now they say that I have been too hard on Trump, who, they maintain, is a man of peace, despite his complete and longstanding support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, his interventions in Syria and the bombing of Yemen, his policy on Ukraine during his first term that was a continuation of the policy pursued by the Obama administration, and his lack of an executive order when taking office this year ending all support for Ukraine.

Both sides tout their peacemaker presidents as they may, shouting peace, peace, while there is no peace. That the U.S. has a permanent warfare state seems lost on them. That they are being played by a sycophant media that thrives on gamesmanship while supporting the warfare state never really penetrates their thinking.

Nevertheless, between easy and hard, I have given much thought to their judgments, only to conclude that both groups are falsely driven by desperate emotions, ahistorical naïveté, and wishful thinking. For it was clear before every presidential election since 1964 (with the possible exception of Democratic Senator George McGovern in 1972) that we were being taken for a ride by bi-partisan thugs for the American Empire, Trump surely not excluded. But pipe-dreams prevailed and the empire rolled on, driven by a propaganda machine second to none.

That propaganda machine is now so powerful because it is so obvious. It’s like those advertisements that mock the products that they are selling only to sell more. Considering themselves too smart for such stupidity, the most well-meaning and intelligent individuals are caught in its tentacles; they have had their minds occupied by its cognitive infiltration. Something so obvious just couldn’t be true for them; couldn’t convince anyone but the most stupid. This is Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

Do they consider the sights and sounds of the U.S./Israel genocide of Palestinians real? Do they ask, “What is Truth?” Do they, like Pontius Pilate, wash their hands and declare their innocence of the blood of Palestinians even as they stand behind their chosen presidential genociders?

Yet I have concluded that it is not primarily propaganda or intelligence that has created this bifurcated checkmate, this stasis of thinking wherein two sides aggressively assert their leaders’ good intentions as opposed to the other. What is presented as terribly complex and confusing is unheard-of-simple, to paraphrase the great Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak. It is heretical to say so, but it is so: Too many people have lost their minds, they are alienated from their own experience and the logic of simple facts. And by doing so have buried their consciences. The Scottish psychiatrist Ronald Laing put it this way in 1967:

There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘normal’ majority as bad or mad.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

We need only consider the one simple example of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians. It has been going on in plain sight for sixteen months under President Biden and four months under President Trump with his full continuing U.S. support. No American can honestly say they didn’t know this genocide was being carried out by their country. According to Israel’s Defense Ministry, as reported on May 28, 2025 by antiwar.com, “The US has delivered 90,000 tons of bombs, guns, and other military equipment to Israel since October 7, 2023, to support the genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to numbers from the Israeli Defense Ministry. The Defense Ministry said Tuesday that the 800th plane carrying US weapons arrived in Israel in the morning, and 140 ships have also delivered US equipment in the nearly 600 days since October 7.”

Knowing about this genocide where well over 50,000 + Palestinians at a minimum, more than a third of them children, have been killed, burnt alive, bombed apart, and far more wounded and starved to death with Biden and Trump’s full support, should make any person who has retained one scintilla of humanity reject these bloodthirsty killers instantly and forever.

But it is not so. They retain the support of their ardent followers. They excuse them. Men who burn children alive are not rejected outright, but are found to have redeeming qualities by their political supporters. Something so inconceivably terrible is happening in full view, but what it signifies about Biden and Trump, the Democrats and the Republicans, is let slide, as if genocide were just a minor foible. These men are often elected by their followers as the lesser of two evils, as if the genocidal slaughter of innocents were a lesser evil. As if …. so many as ifs. So many excuses.

Yes, it is unheard-of-simple. While there are endless U.S. wars of aggression and massive slaughters of innocents one could cite to make a case against the support of U.S. leaders, this one example should suffice. You either unequivocally accept or reject those who support genocide. No ifs, ands, or buts.

At what temperature do children burn? Do you really not know?

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post The Lesser of Two Evils: The Burning of Children Instead of Paper appeared first on LewRockwell.