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Thanks, John Frahm.

Dave Ramsey slams Washington lawmakers, reveals what’s killing small businesses

See here.

The post Dave Ramsey slams Washington lawmakers, reveals what’s killing small businesses appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Chronicles Magazines

The post Ike and the “Military Industrial Complex” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The American Conservative

The post The End of Neoconservatism appeared first on LewRockwell.

Mike Benz on how NGOs run the world on behalf of a small number of very dangerous people.

Chapters:
0:00:00 Introduction
0:01:20 What Are NGOs?
0:05:11 The 3 Levels of The Blob
0:09:00 Why the CIA Was Really Created
0:21:41 Why So Many American Companies Are Wrapped up in the NGO Madness
0:24:02 George Soros’ Open Society Foundation
0:30:54 Foreign Governments’ Failed Attempts to Escape NGO Control
0:36:58 The Dark Side of America’s Global Domination
0:42:14 The Soros Connection to the State Department Is Deeper Than You Think
0:50:33 How the CIA Controls the Education System
0:58:03 The Anti-American Agendas American Taxpayers Are Funding
1:01:19 What You Should Know About the US Institute of Peace
1:11:57 What DOGE Found When They Tried to Shut Down the Institute of Peace
1:15:31 Why The Blob Hates Putin
1:22:21 George Soros’ Coup of Mongolia
1:30:57 The Blob’s Regime Change Strategy Playing Out in the US
1:42:48 How Trump Has Successfully Drained the Swamp So Far
1:54:06 What Trump Should Focus On Next

The post Tucker Carlson – Mike Benz: How NGOs Have Dominated the World, Who’s Behind Them, & How They’re Now Undermining Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

Tim McGraw wrote:

Alcatraz means “Pelican” in Spanish. It’s a fitting name. Pelicans eventually go blind from diving into the water to catch fish. There is a lot of catching fish, nets, and blindness at Alcatraz…and San Francisco in general.

“Welcome to the Rock!” Sean Connery.

The post Alcatraz appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith.   

Antiwar.com

The post Gaza Doctors Lose Nine of Their 10 Children in Israeli Airstrike appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Smith. 

The Cradle

The post Over 80 percent of Israelis endorse ‘forced expulsion’ of Gaza’s population appeared first on LewRockwell.

Brian Dunaway wrote:

There are lots of ways to disappear people, even entire peoples. One way is to simply pretend that they don’t exist.

As a side note to their article, ZH states that, “Increasingly, conflict is being renewed in the West Bank …”

The “West Bank,” since it’s capitalized, must be an actual place. But this Reuters photo that ZH included in its article suggests it isn’t. I wonder if anyone in the press that was present for Netanyahu’s presentation asked him where the West Bank went?

The post West Bank Disappeared appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

Eugyppius

The post German pensioner receives 75-day prison sentence in latest speech crime scandal to hit the Federal Republic appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Trump Hits ‘Crazy’ Putin In Rage-Filled Post appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com Blog

The post Video Shows Girl Trying To Escape Inferno as Gaza Family ‘Burned Alive’ in Israeli Massacre appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the death of BLM hero, the petty criminal George Floyd.  There is a very strong case to be made that President Trump should pardon officer Derek Chauvin.  See below.

The Anatomy of the Neck Argues against Asphyxiation

What They Didn’t Want You to See in the Chauvin Case

Big George Floyd

The post George Floyd Death Anniversary appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/perche-lamerica-non-ha-bisogno-di)

D'accordo, il titolo è un po' forte e ha un tono volutamente beffardo, ma deve esserlo perché nel catechismo della politica estera nazionale è radicata una presunzione, quasi sacra, secondo cui “alleati”, “alleanze” e “coalizioni dei volenterosi” sono il fondamento di una politica estera illuminata, necessaria ed efficace.

I politici e i diplomatici americani non dovrebbero quindi mai lasciare queste coste al resto del mondo. Questo dogma ha raggiunto la sua massima espressione nella “coalizione dei volenterosi” del Segretario di Stato, James Baker, durante la prima, assolutamente inutile, Guerra del Golfo nel 1991 e da allora ci tormenta... purtroppo.

In realtà, la verità è più o meno l'opposto, quindi va espressa in modo crudo, quasi provocatorio. In altre parole, gli alleati nel mondo di oggi sono per lo più un peso, del tutto irrilevanti per la sicurezza militare della patria americana e una fonte importante di inutili attriti e persino di veri e propri conflitti tra le nazioni.

In parole povere, l'America è stata resa un egemone economico e militare da tutte le piccole e medie nazioni che ha schierato in alleanze formali e di fatto, dato che sono incentivate a perseguire politiche che minimizzano i propri investimenti nella difesa e incoraggiate a gettare al vento la cautela diplomatica. In altre parole, le “alleanze” di Washington consentono ai politici interni o ai governi eletti di questi piccoli alleati di essere più aggressivi o conflittuali nei confronti dei “cattivi” designati da Washington di quanto non sarebbero sicuramente se operassero solo con le proprie forze.

Ad esempio, l'ex-primo ministro estone tra il 2021 e il 2024, Kaja Kallas, e ora Capo degli affari esteri dell'UE, è stata una critica sguaiata e al vetriolo della Russia e una sostenitrice intransigente dell'invio di denaro altrui [cioè il vostro] a sostegno dell'altrettanto inutile guerra per procura contro la Russia nelle steppe ucraine.

Con una popolazione di appena 1,3 milioni di abitanti, un PIL di appena $40 miliardi e una forza armata di 8.000 unità, l'Estonia rappresenta un alleato insignificante nello schema generale delle cose. Quindi non contribuisce in alcun modo alla sicurezza nazionale americana.

D'altronde, se non esistessero la NATO e lo scudo militare degli Stati Uniti previsto dall'Articolo 5, pensate che la Kallas esulterebbe a gran voce per Zelensky? Il suo popolo avrebbe tollerato il suo atteggiamento da piccolo Davide che brandisce una fionda contro il Golia della porta accanto?

Osiamo dire che sarebbe prevalso l'esatto opposto. L'Estonia e il suo leader si sarebbero preoccupati di comportarsi bene con il loro vicino di dimensioni extra large, come hanno sempre fatto i piccoli Paesi da tempo immemore.

E se per qualche motivo la buona diplomazia e la conduzione di un commercio economico reciprocamente vantaggioso non avessero funzionato, cosa che accade quasi sempre, sarebbero stati obbligati ad armarsi fino al collo. Ovvero, mobilitare il 10-25% del PIL per la difesa, se necessario, anziché il misero 2,9% del PIL che l'Estonia effettivamente spende. A sua volta ciò avrebbe creato un deterrente: la resistenza a un potenziale aggressore, l'alto costo in sangue e denaro che sarebbe stato costretto ad affrontare violando i confini e la sovranità di un vicino più piccolo.

E, per l'amor del cielo, il mondo del XXI secolo non è certo un caso isolato per quanto riguarda le relazioni tra nazioni grandi, piccole e medie. “Fare pace” in diplomazia ed economia e rendere chiara la deterrenza è in realtà il modo in cui il mondo delle nazioni dovrebbe funzionare e, prima dell'ascesa dell'Egemone sulle rive del Potomac, di solito funzionava.

Di certo gli dei della storia non hanno conferito ai politici e ai burocrati di Washington il mandato di farsi amici e di salvaguardare, da un capo all'altro del pianeta, ogni piccolo uomo dal respiro affannoso dei grandi uomini nelle vicinanze.

Infatti in un mondo senza l'Egemone sulle rive del Potomac, nessuno avrebbe pensato di definire “ispirazione” la sconsiderata follia di Kiev nell'attaccare militarmente e brutalizzare le popolazioni russofone del Donbass dopo il colpo di stato di Piazza Maidan nel febbraio 2014. Si è trattato di una stupidaggine incredibile – qualcosa che i vicini non storditi dallo scudo militare dell'Egemone o istigati da CIA, NED, USAID, Dipartimento di Stato e Pentagono non avrebbero avuto problemi a riconoscere e comprendere.

Infatti questa osservazione si applica a tutta la schiera di piccoli Paesi che sono stati ammessi nella NATO dall'inizio del secolo. Ad esempio, per quanto riguarda i cinque piccoli Paesi balcanici che non condividono nemmeno le coste del Mar Nero con la Russia, ecco la misera capacità militare e il peso della difesa (misurati in percentuale del PIL) che apportano alla sicurezza nazionale americana.

Per mettere in prospettiva questa esiguità di personale militare, prendiamo in considerazione innanzitutto, a titolo di confronto, le dimensioni delle forze di polizia nelle principali città statunitensi. Mentre questi poliziotti possono mangiare troppe ciambelle sul lavoro e quindi non superare qualsiasi test di prontezza al combattimento, quando si tratta di pura forza umana, le forze di polizia cittadine elencate qui superano la maggior parte di quelle che questi “alleati” balcanici offrono.

Dimensioni delle forze di polizia nelle principali città degli Stati Uniti:

• New York City: 36.000 unità

• Chicago: 13.100 unità

• Los Angeles: 10.000 unità

• Filadelfia: 6.500 unità

Questo per dire che tutte le città sopra menzionate hanno forze di uomini in blu più numerose rispetto alla maggior parte dei piccoli alleati della NATO raffigurati di seguito, dove mostriamo la loro forza militare attiva e la loro spesa per la difesa in percentuale del PIL.

• Croazia: 14.300 unità/1,8% del PIL

• Macedonia del Nord: 8.000 unità/1,7% del PIL

• Slovenia: 7.300 unità/1,5% del PIL

• Albania: 6.600 unità/1,7% del PIL

• Montenegro: 2.350 unità/1,6% del PIL

Chiaramente questi Paesi non tremano per niente di fronte all'orso russo. Nell'ultimo anno di guerra per procura tra NATO e Russia nelle sventurate steppe dell'Ucraina, nessuno di questi cinque si è nemmeno preoccupato di spendere il 2% del PIL per la difesa!

Infatti persino i pesci più grossi, posizionati gomito a gomito con la Russia sul Mar Nero, non hanno mostrato una paura maggiore di fronte all'orso russo. La Romania spende solo il 2,2% del PIL per la difesa e i suoi elettori volevano eleggere un presidente che voleva stringere amicizia con Putin – un leader eletto democraticamente, ovviamente, odiato dagli “alleati” della Romania a Bruxelles e Washington.

Allo stesso modo, la Bulgaria spende solo il 2,2% per la difesa e la Serbia non ha nemmeno ritenuto opportuno aderire alla NATO. Beh, non da quando la sua capitale è stata bombardata in mille pezzi nel 1999 dagli aerei da guerra della NATO, a causa della sua insistenza sul fatto che il Kosovo non fosse separato dal suo territorio sovrano in base al mandato di Bill e Hillary Clinton.

Anche in quanto alleato fermo della Russia nella regione, la Serbia spende circa il 2,3% del PIL per la difesa e ha circa 28.000 uomini attivi in ​​uniforme nelle sue forze armate. Vale a dire, le forze neutrali serbe ammontano a circa la stessa potenza militare combinata dei cinque piccoli Paesi della sponda adriatica dei Balcani.

Inoltre risulta anche che questi cinque piccoli membri della NATO spendono in realtà circa la stessa miseria per le capacità militari di Ungheria e Slovacchia, confinanti con l'Ucraina. La prima spende circa il 2,0% del PIL per la difesa, mentre la spesa militare della seconda è del 2,1% del PIL. Eppure entrambi i governi, vicini all'orso russo, si oppongono con fermezza alla guerra per procura della NATO in Ucraina e vanno piuttosto d'accordo con Mosca!

In breve, nessuno di questi Paesi sembra davvero temere l'orso russo, altrimenti spenderebbero percentuali a due cifre del loro PIL per armarsi così bene da offrire un pasto poco invitante al presunto aggressore russo. Al contrario, o hanno aderito alla NATO per entrare nel Club Atlantico, o hanno semplicemente rifiutato l'opportunità (Serbia) o si sono lasciati trasportare (Ungheria e Slovacchia).

Il punto è che estendere la NATO ai Balcani è stata una stupidaggine perpetrata dai burocrati dello Stato militare a Washington e Bruxelles. Non contribuisce assolutamente alla difesa nazionale americana dal punto di vista militare, mentre consente ai piccoli vicini di casa della Russia di spendere una miseria per la difesa e di tanto in tanto provocare l'orso russo, cosa che non si sognerebbero mai di fare con i loro 8.000 soldati armati alla leggera.

Naturalmente lo stesso discorso vale a nord, sul Baltico. Le tre repubbliche baltiche hanno entrambe vissuto e ricordano i decenni di occupazione sovietica, eppure i loro attuali bilanci pubblici dimostrano ampiamente che non percepiscono affatto la Russia postcomunista come una minaccia esistenziale. Ecco perché spendono soldi in eserciti fittizi, mentre i loro politici, come la Kallas, fanno demagogia su Putin per aizzare gli elettori e ottenere il favore dei burocrati neocon guerrafondai che dominano la NATO e l'UE.

Tuttavia nessun Paese con le scarse capacità militari illustrate nei numeri qui sotto teme davvero il vicino russo. Se lo facesse, con o senza la NATO, investirebbe i propri fondi di bilancio laddove si cela la deplorevole retorica di alcuni politici dalla lingua lunga.

Dimensioni delle forze armate e di difesa in % del PIL:

• Lituania: 14.100 unità/2,8% del PIL

• Estonia: 7.700 unità/2,9% del PIL

• Lettonia: 6.750 unità/2,4% del PIL

In breve, le osservazioni di Trump hanno colto nel segno nel caso di tutti questi insignificanti alleati della NATO.

In altre parole, tutti questi alleati sono molto più problematici di quanto valgano. La sicurezza militare del territorio americano può essere garantita da un'invincibile triade nucleare strategica basata su bombardieri, missili balistici intercontinentali terrestri e sottomarini nucleari – nessuno dei quali richiede basi o “alleati” stranieri. Questo, unito a una potente difesa convenzionale delle sue coste e del suo spazio aereo, sarebbe più che sufficiente a garantire la sicurezza militare del territorio americano nel mondo odierno.

Nessuna di queste capacità militari è minimamente rafforzata dagli alleati insignificanti che sono stati arruolati nella NATO sin dal 1999. Né nel mondo odierno vi è alcun rischio che una potenza come la Russia, o la Cina, possa attaccare, conquistare e accumulare decine di migliaia di miliardi di PIL, manodopera in età militare e capacità di produzione militare.

Infatti sia la Russia che la Cina sanno bene che il costo dell'invasione, della conquista e della pacificazione nel mondo odierno non varrebbero minimamente la candela. Ecco perché la risposta alla domanda su quanti Paesi la Cina comunista abbia conquistato negli ultimi quattro decenni è zero!

Al contrario, le 750 basi americane e i 160.000 militari dislocati all'estero, dal Giappone alla Germania, dall'Italia al Regno Unito, rappresentano in realtà dei pericolosi “cavi di inciampo” progettati per:

• Fornire una scusa alle aziende della difesa statunitense per vendere armi alle nazioni alleate in cui hanno sede le forze armate statunitensi.

• Creare una scusa per intromettersi nei conflitti stranieri basandosi sul fatto che i militari americani sono in pericolo.

Durante il periodo di massimo sviluppo dell'America come la più grande nazione sulla Terra (dalla cancellazione del trattato con la Francia nel 1797 alla ratifica del trattato NATO nel 1949), l'America non aveva alleanze, trattati militari o alleati autorizzati a provocare conflitti con i propri vicini, con l'intesa che lo Zio Sam avesse coperto loro le spalle.

Durante quei 152 anni tutto andò per il meglio per l'America, così come per qualsiasi altra nazione nella storia, prima e dopo di essa. E assolutamente nulla è cambiato affinché la saggezza di Washington e Jefferson venissero alterate riguardo l'evitare alleanze all'estero.

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

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The Hate That Hate Produced shocked Americans of all creeds and colours. Broadcast in July 1959, this five-part documentary brought the Nation of Islam (and, to a lesser extent, the United African Nationalist Movement) to wider public attention for arguably the first time. Few Americans had hitherto been exposed to the black nationalism and even black supremacism of the Nation of Islam – a religious and political organisation that called for black and white Americans to live in separate states. The Hate That Hate Produced achieved something else, too: it catapulted a then little-known Malcolm X to national prominence.

The Hate That Hate Produced featured various Black Muslims, as Nation of Islam followers are sometimes called, finding white people guilty of various crimes. In the dramatic words of Malcolm X himself:

‘I charge the white man with being the greatest murderer on Earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest kidnapper on Earth.‘

Given views being expressed like this, it’s hardly a surprise that The Hate That Hate Produced unnerved a great many. But it also inspired a significant minority of black Americans. Indeed, within weeks of the documentary being broadcast, the number of people attending Nation of Islam meetings increased significantly, and the group’s membership doubled to 60,000. By 1961, there were an estimated 100,000 Black Muslims in the US (1).

Malcolm initially appeared on the The Hate That Hate Produced to introduce the then leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad. He also appeared in a later episode as part of a panel discussion. He had enjoyed a minimal public profile up until then, but that changed almost overnight. From that point on, Malcolm X became a major public figure, not to mention a source of quotes guaranteed to outrage conservative America.

He had been on quite a journey up until then. Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska on 19 May 1925. He was the seventh child of his father, Earl Little, and the fourth child of his mother, Louise. His father was a tall, dark-skinned man from Georgia, and his mixed-race mother was from Grenada, in the British West Indies. Both of his parents were strong advocates of Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), the Jamaican-born black separatist who, in the 1920s, led a back-to-Africa movement – that is, a movement calling for the descendants of black slaves to return to Africa.

Shortly after Malcolm’s birth, Earl Little moved his family out of Nebraska, before ultimately settling in Lansing, Michigan. When Malcolm was six years old, his father was killed in what the family deemed suspicious circumstances. Whereas official reports stated that he had been killed in a streetcar accident, the insurance company refused to pay out on what they categorised as a suicide. Malcolm later surmised that his father had been killed by white racists.

In the seventh grade, Malcolm enrolled in a predominantly white junior high school in Mason, Michigan, where he excelled academically and was even elected president of his class. Yet, by the end of the following school year, he had dropped out, aged 15. The reason he gave was a discouraging counselling session with a teacher, who advised him to train as a carpenter instead of a lawyer because carpentry was more appropriate for a ‘nigger’.

At the same time, Malcolm’s family life had been plunged into chaos. In 1938, his mother was committed to Kalamazoo State Hospital after having a breakdown. A then 13-year-old Malcolm and his siblings were housed in various foster homes before he eventually went to live with his half-sister in Boston, Massachusetts. He soon became a street hustler and petty criminal. Having been arrested for robbery in 1944, he was charged, found guilty and eventually given a seven-year prison sentence in 1946, which he served at Boston’s Charlestown Prison.

Prison – or more accurately, the prison library – liberated Malcolm. ‘My alma mater was books, a good library’, he later explained: ‘I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.’ There he changed his name to Malcolm X, on the grounds that ‘Little’ was a ‘slave name’ given to his ancestors.

It was during his time in prison that Malcolm came into contact with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, which was then a small, urban-prophet cult committed to religious and racial segregation, with branches in Detroit, Chicago and New York. At the time it had no more than a few hundred members. Malcolm’s brother was already a Black Muslim, and convinced Malcolm to convert, too. While in prison Malcolm began communicating with Muhammad via mail. After being released on parole in 1952, Malcolm visited him in Chicago, before setting to work recruiting Black Muslims in Detroit.

At six foot three, Malcolm was an imposing, impressive figure. One historian was moved to describe him as ‘mesmerisingly handsome… and always spotlessly well-groomed’ (2). He was also a talented speaker and soon became the chief spokesman and organiser for the Nation of Islam. His speeches were virtuoso performances of rhythm, improvised cadences, silences and eruptions. Having heard Malcolm X speak at a debate at Oxford University in 1964, British radical Tariq Ali remarked that his ‘speeches were like word-jazz, with gestures but no other accompaniment, except the response of the crowd’.

Malcolm’s rise to political prominence coincided with that of Martin Luther King, the other pivotal African American leader of the era. Though hostile to each other, the two shared many characteristics. Both were hugely talented and intellectually capable. Where they differed was in their vision of America. King’s optimism moved him to embrace the nation’s liberal promise, and push it to extend the same rights and freedoms enjoyed by white Americans to black Americans. Malcolm gave vent to a considerably more pessimistic and cynical view. He thought the US was incapable of ever fulfilling its promises to its most significant minority.

Indeed, for a time, Malcolm was King’s polar opposite. His pessimism and championing of black separatism challenged the optimistic vision King had of a racially integrated United States. Malcolm repeatedly pointed to black Americans’ lack of freedom, particularly in the South – despite it being over 100 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, which pledged to free black Americans from slavery. ‘Being born here in America doesn’t make you an American’, he told an audience in 1964. Or, as he put it more succinctly, referring to the first pilgrims who landed in Massachusetts on the Mayflower: ‘We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us.’

Read the Whole Article

The post Malcolm X at 100: the Forgotten Legacy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Recently, Biden was announced to have (likely terminal) metastatic prostate cancer. Scott Adams took that moment to announce that he did as well and that:

• Despite being a longtime critic of Biden, he deeply empathized with Biden’s plight and hoped people could show both him and Biden kindness rather than hate. He also noted he’d delayed announcing his cancer to avoid dealing with online hate and that “people are really cruel…and are going to say it’s because I got the COVID shot—there’s no indication that that makes a difference.”

• The pain from his cancer is intolerable; being on high doses of pain killers has turned him into a zombie, he now needs a walker, and he’s had to reduce his podcasts.

• He tried ivermectin and febendazole and was hopeful it would work, but it did not, and he does not want any more medical advice, nor does he want to discuss any of his cancer’s clinical history; rather he just wants to continue his podcast until his life ends.

• Because of his pain and the futility of his condition, he is deeply grateful that California allows medically assisted suicide, and he expects to be dead by the summer.

• He has often been able to visually see his future (e.g., what his future house would look like), but what he sees in the future is simply “black” so he knows he is going to die.
Note: during my life, I’ve met numerous people who had an uncanny ability to predict future events, all of whom shared that it was in part due to some degree of “psychic” foresight.

Since Scott Adams’ experience encapsulates an unfortunate but very real facet of the cancer experience, I edited his recent podcast down to just those parts:

As many know of Adams (Trump even repeatedly called him to offer support), his announcement and the bleakness surrounding it profoundly disturbed the online community and many of his previous critics, out of empathy for Scott stopped attacking him. I’ve since received many requests to comment on specific facets of it (e.g., fenbendazole and ivermectin or what’s causing these turbo cancers).

In this article, I will cover each of these and provide some context as to why I’ve taken a different approach than others when writing about cancer.

Facts Don’t Matter, Persuasion is Everything

For most of my life, the presidential election has always followed one of two courses:

• Someone skilled at influencing the public (e.g., Reagan, Clinton, or Obama) is supported by the media and wins.

• The media builds up a marginal candidate and tears down their competitors (including popular ones with populist positions) and by having everyone collapse around the chosen nominee, makes the marginal candidate appear much better than they were at the start.

When the first Republican presidential debate happened in August 2015, Trump’s odds of winning the presidency were around 1%, and most assumed he’d joined the race as a publicity stunt. As I watched the first presidential debate, I realized that:

• The 2016 primary had been set up to have all the candidates collapse around Jeb Bush so that he could be elevated to run against Hillary.

• Trump was by far the strongest candidate running, and he was also espousing populist positions that the electorate wanted.

• Based on his answer to the Rosie O’Donnell question, Trump had a degree of verbal intelligence that made him able to withstand the kill shots the media normally used to eliminate unwanted candidates.

• If Trump went after Jeb Bush, he could likely steal his spot and collapse the nomination around him.

So once the debate ended, I checked on his betting odds, saw they were way too low, and told my friends who make these types of investments that those margins would disappear in the next few days once the market caught up and recognized Trump had a realistic chance of winning.

Around the same time, Scott Adams began posting that Trump had a realistic shot of becoming president (specifically, on July 2nd he said he didn’t support Trump but he also did not support the way he was being attacked by the media, on August 5th he said there was a viable but improbable path for him to become president, on August 24th he said Trump had a more effective way to persuade the electorate than Bush, and by August 28th said Trump would win by a large margin). Since he was one of the earliest contrarian voices to say that (e.g., on August 28th another prominent pollster had given Trump a 2% chance of the GOP nomination), Adams rapidly built a following that expanded on these themes and has now grown to over a million Twitter followers.

Scott’s central message was that since he had worked as a hypnotist, he believed facts are largely irrelevant for shifting people’s opinions, and rather how they are conveyed is what matters (which to a large degree I believe is true—although I take a different approach to reaching people than Scott). In turn, Scott repeatedly identified how Trump was using persuasive messaging when sharing his talking points (e.g., his words contained poignant visual metaphors), and blended that into content creation revolving around how persuasive language and the human tendency to filter out what they don’t want to see underlies much of what happens in society.

Because of this focus, he used his framework to analyze the correct decision regarding vaccination. In the first half of 2021, he shared that vaccination had no risks, potentially protected you from long COVID-19, gave you back your freedom, would create herd immunity to COVID-19, and to varying extents belittled people who chose not to vaccinate—all of which offended many of his followers and gradually led to him being nicknamed “Clot Adams.”

Later, in January 2023, to his credit, he posted a video admitting he was wrong and the antivaxxers were entirely correct. However, framed the decision to not vaccinate as being due to one’s “luck” of habitually not trusting the government and that being correct in this one instance, rather than one of intelligence, as all the data at the time had shown vaccination to be the correct choice and every intelligent person (Adams included) who correctly analyzed that data had concluded vaccinating was the proper choice.

Given that this wasn’t entirely true (e.g., a large amount of censored data showed otherwise, historical precedent shows the US government always lies about dangerous vaccines, and many of the arguments for the vaccine didn’t make logical sense), many were understandably offended by this.
Note: another prominent online author, Emily Oster, used similar logic in a highly controversial October 2022 plea for COVID amnesty in the Atlantic.

In parallel, since the COVID vaccine has such a high rate of injuries, many prominent individuals were injured by them in a manner that could not be covered up, including many political leaders (e.g., 4 of the 48 Democrat senators had severe brain injuries specifically linked to the vaccines). All of them had promoted the vaccine, and remarkably, these severe injuries did not change their stance on the vaccine (even in the case of one Democrat Congressman who had his 17 year old daughter die suddenly from cardiac arrest).

In the midst of all this insanity, Robert Malone advocated for explaining it through Mattias Desmet’s mass formation hypothesis, which stated that under the right conditions, malignant crowd consciousnesses can take over groups of people which cause them to do completely insane and horrific things, and that the group will be incredibly resistant to any external feedback which suggesting stopping it. One of the less appreciated facets of this theory is that mass formations will inevitably die off (as they are self-consuming). Once they conclude and the insanity around them dissipates, history judges their proponents harshly.

Note: a strong case can be made that Biden suffered rapidly accelerating dementia following COVID vaccination. Since he mandated the vaccines and demonized anyone opposed to them, that is now his “legacy,” and both his political collapse and death will most likely be looked back on as yet another consequence of his horrendous decision to push the vaccines.

Early Red Flags

Given what had happened with the 1976 Swine Flu (where a “safe” vaccine the government knew was dangerous was rushed to market so it would reach America “in time” and then injured many), at the end of 2019, I was worried something similar would happen with COVID. As such, I spent a lot of time looking for ways to treat the virus so people I knew would not be forced to choose between a risky vaccine and the risk of dying from COVID.

In December of 2020, (still unidentified) hackers accessed Europe’s FDA (the EMA) and leaked some of the EMA’s regulatory documents on Pfizer’s vaccine to both the dark web and journalists. Since I was concerned about the vaccine and had a background in drug research, I read through them in detail and was left with the impression that:

• Pfizer consistently chose the available option (e.g., for its lipid nanoparticles) that was most likely to produce a viable product rather than what would produce a safe one.

• Despite going out of their way to green light the vaccines, drug regulators still raised numerous clear issues with the vaccines (e.g., fragmented rather than compete mRNA being in the vaccines or COVID rapidly becoming resistant to the vaccine), which subsequently were never publicly mentioned and to the best of my knowledge were never solved prior the vaccines hitting the market.

• Pfizer was allowed to skip a variety of critical safety studies that should have been conducted before the drugs hit the market. These included testing for genetic toxicity, cancer, impairing fertility, and autoimmune disorders—despite those being amongst the greatest concerns for this experimental gene therapy (e.g., many had pointed out the vaccines had a high risk of causing autoimmune disorders and much of this testing is typically required for gene therapies).

Note: in the EMA documents, the WHO’s 2005 position was that lipids and RNA (the vaccine’s components) were “not expected” to have genotoxicity or carcinogenicity and hence did not need to be tested for (despite regulators also noting that a component of the lipid nanoparticle was a known carcinogen). Likewise, Pfizer’s current FDA label admits that genotoxicity and carcinogenicity were never tested for.

I hence predicted that many of these issues would come to pass, and that it was quite likely many of them had been identified during clinical studies but were not reported to regulators, as “plausible deniability” of knowledge of those side effects was the only viable way to get the vaccines approved.

As such, I warned everyone I knew that the COVID vaccines might initially appear safe, but there were serious risks of long-term side effects that would take time to show up (particularly since something very similar had recently happened with the HPV vaccine). However, the moment the vaccine hit the market, I was astonished to discover that I’d greatly underestimated its toxicity and was seeing numerous patients each day who’d developed significant reactions to the vaccine they’d never experienced before. Likewise, people from around the country had begun reaching out to me to ask if the vaccine could cause you to “die suddenly” as this had recently happened to their relative (e.g., from a stroke or heart attack).

Given how much more severe the reactions were than what I’d expected, I realized the chronic issues would most likely exceed the worst case scenario I’d previously envisioned and suspected the EMA leaks rather than being hacked, came from an honest regulator who was alarmed by the gross violation of regulatory standards and what was being pushed through (but was powerless to stop it).

Note: similar in America, whistleblowers, internal Zoom recordings, and documents obtained by Senator Johnson reveal that FDA and CDC officials were fully aware of the potential dangers associated with the COVID-19 vaccines. Despite this, oncologist Dr. Peter Marks, the FDA official overseeing all vaccine-related matters, repeatedly slow-walked concerns raised by the vaccine-injured—offering empathy alongside continual excuses to delay acknowledging injuries (that were backed by credible data). He also removed two of the FDA’s top vaccine scientists who had expressed concern over the rushed approval process, discouraged the CDC from issuing even basic safety guidance (e.g., advising children with vaccine-induced myocarditis to temporarily avoid sports to reduce the risk of sudden cardiac death), and at a private conference, dismissed those questioning vaccine safety—including injured individuals he publicly claimed to empathize with—as irrational and not worth engaging.

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Although ChatGPT and other AI systems have received massive media attention since late 2022, I only began dipping my toe in those waters about a year ago.

At that time, I released a series of chatbots for many of the individual authors on our website, with each of these produced by focusing it individually upon the total content we’d published from that corresponding writer.

These notably included the Ron Unz Chatbot, drawing upon roughly a million and a half words of my own articles, and some of our readers have subsequently used it to simulate my own reactions on various issues. For example, earlier this month a commenter used this Unz chatbot to write a 10,000 word article on some aspects of McCarthyism, which he published as a very long comment.

• American Pravda: Laminated Mouse-Brains and the Magic of AI
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 10, 2024 • 15,000 Words
• Questioning Our Writers, Whether Living or Dead
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 15, 2024 • 6,600 Words

Several months ago, I added another AI feature, having the ChatGPT system automatically produce short summaries and outlines for every article we published that was longer than 1,000 words. This allowed readers to easily get a rough sense of those pieces that they lacked the time or interest to actually read:

• Providing AI Summaries of Website Articles
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 14, 2025 • 1,400 Words

However, with hundreds of billions of dollars of ongoing capital spending on AI, these software systems have continued to rapidly improve, and I recently learned that OpenAI had released a new and especially powerful version of ChatGPT called Deep Research.

Whereas ChatGPT and most other chatbots are designed to respond within seconds, the Deep Research AI may spend up to 30 minutes working on a given assigned topic, but it uses that time to produce remarkably advanced results. For example, on a standard benchmark test, the GPT-4o system scored only 3.3%, DeepSeek’s R1 model did much better at 9.4%, but Deep Research rated a vastly superior 26.6%.

Once I began testing the Deep Research AI, these numbers seemed quite plausible to me. I discovered that the system can very effectively be used to fact-check long, complex articles of the sort that I often write. After a couple of such tests, I was so impressed that I have now had dozens of my American Pravda articles fact-checked by Deep Research.

I was hardly surprised that such a powerful new AI system was also very resource-intensive, so basic ChatGPT users have been limited to twenty-five Deep Research runs per month, with only the first ten being at full power and quality. Moreover, since the system is so new, these runs sometimes fail, with those failures still being counted towards that monthly limit.

But despite those minor inconveniences, I was absolutely astonished by the analytical quality of what Deep Research produced, results that fully validated the dramatic claims made in media accounts.

It’s been widely recognized that all of these recent AI systems have easily blown past the decades-old “Turing Test” of machine intelligence, but the output of the Deep Research AI was entirely on a different level. Many or most of its full-power analysis runs seemed as if they had been written by an exceptionally intelligent individual who had read nearly everything published on the entire Internet and also had almost total recall.

Although I’m still not entirely convinced that the hundreds of billions of dollars currently being invested in AI will ever produce an adequate financial return, the AI systems created are certainly one of the most amazing things I’ve ever encountered, being closer to magic than software technology, and doing things I never would have believed possible in a million years. If some company had invented a practical teleportation device, I probably would have regarded such a product as much less remarkable.

Regardless of any future advances, I have already found the current fact-checking capabilities of the Deep Research AI extremely useful, especially with regard to the very controversial and non-mainstream content of so many of my own articles.

As a trivial example of the power of the system, it easily caught several small factual mistakes that I’d made in some of my articles, mistakes that for many years had escaped my own notice and that of all my readers. Reacting in exemplary fashion, Deep Research flagged these as minor, careless errors that should be corrected while also dismissing the notion that they seriously detracted from the broader accuracy of those articles.

At the top of each fact-checking run, I have included a selection of the AI remarks and my own responses, and here’s an example of one such exchange regarding my first 2018 article on the JFK Assassination:

AI: “Thomas Burnett” writing in a French newsweekly – this appears to be a reference to journalist Thomas G. Buchanan…His minor error is the name “Thomas Burnett” – the person in question was Thomas G. Buchanan, who wrote in L’Express.

Unz: Corrected.

Deep Research found another such careless mistake in an article I had published a couple of weeks later on some aspects of World War II:

AI: Claim: Unz recounts that in July 1940, Britain attacked and sank its former ally’s fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, killing “up to 2,000 Frenchmen,” an event he likens to Pearl Harbor in surprise and effect…this is an overestimate; most sources put fatalities around 1,200–1,300.

Unz: Corrected.

But the vast majority of the analysis text produced by the Deep Research AI, totaling around 400,000 words across nearly fifty fact-checking runs, provided carefully-written critiques of my articles, focusing on factual information, logical inferences, and even source representation. Once again, I found it absolutely astonishing that this material was written by an AI rather than an extremely intelligent human researcher with oceans of factual information at his fingertips.

Articles that have such fact-checking runs available now have a button labeled “AI Fact Check” near the top and clicking it opens a saved, annotated copy of the Deep Research fact-checking run in a new browser tab.

Although there were many differences of opinion or other disputes, the Deep Research AI was so powerful and accurate that I was actually surprised at its occasional errors, much like I would be surprised if a super-powerful, all-seeing magical genie sometimes made such mistakes.

In the case of the Deep Research AI, these errors often turned out to be among the few it claimed to have found in my own work.

For example, the first of my articles that I tested mostly dealt with the long-suppressed story of the “Zebra killings,” a large wave of random racial murders that occurred in San Francisco and other parts of California during the early 1970s. Deep Research seemed to find a number of significant errors in my article, but all of these turned out to be mistaken. These errors often seemed due to its apparent lack of access to the full texts of the books that I had relied upon.

AI: The first Zebra murders in SF occurred in October 1973, not 1972​…The exact date “1972” is off by a year. So this claim is partly accurate…

Unz: The first SF Zebra killings described in detail did indeed take place in October 1973, but according to p. 34 of the Clark Howard book, some 270 other racial killings of whites in California had already occurred by that date.

AI: This “9 kills” rule appears only in Unz’s summary (and likely the extremist blog, see below). We could find no historical record of a formal quota of nine. Thus this claim is inaccurate and unsupported.

Unz: The requirement to kill nine white men first appears on p. 28 of the Clark Howard book and in numerous other places in the text.

AI: There is no evidence that police officially estimated “over 70” murders or that Howard thought “270.” In fact, Clark Howard’s book details 23 victims identified in San Francisco during 1973–74. The figure “270” appears only on an extremist blog (the Zebra Project)…Unz’s numbers wildly exceed documented totals. We conclude this claim is inaccurate/hyperbolic.

Unz: The following statement appears on p. 34 of the hardcover edition of the Clark Howard book:

At that time, there were fifteen accredited Death Angels in California. To achieve their collective membership, they had already quietly killed throughout the state 135 white men, 75 white women, 60 white children…

Thus, the total number of alleged white victims was 270 by that point.

AI: “The Zebra killings were the single greatest instance of racially-motivated killing in modern American history… [with] possibly greater victims than the combined total of all other such examples over the last 100 years.”​ Even if we accept 73 possible Zebra victims, numerous other racial violence events in U.S. history (e.g. massacres like Wounded Knee 1890, Tulsa Race Massacre 1921, etc.) involved far more deaths, though those predate the “last 100 years”…We mark this inaccurate/unsupported.

Unz: I explicitly said “the last 100 years” and anyway most of the contrary examples cited were not necessarily racially-motivated killings rather than military massacres or violent, deadly riots.

AI: “To this day, except on obscure websites, the Zebra killings have been virtually erased from public memory”…David Talbot’s 2012 Season of the Witch does include the story​…The claim that only a “white supremacist blog” records it is false…So this claim is exaggerated/misleading.

Unz: I specifically mentioned that it was discussed in the Talbot book, but emphasized that Talbot had been forced “to cite an obscure white racialist blogsite” as one of his only sources of information.

AI: Unz claims Talbot “included a discussion of the Zebra killings” and attributes to him citing the extremist blog​. We could not access the book’s text. If Talbot did mention Zebras, he may or may not have cited that blog; it’s unconfirmed. Thus Unz’s statement about Talbot is hearsay. It serves his narrative of a “media blackout.” Because we cannot verify, we label that use as unsubstantiated speculation.

Unz: On p. 420 of his book, Talbot cites that extremist blogsite as his main documentary source for the Zebra killings.

• American Pravda: The KKK and Mass Racial Killings
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 19, 2016 • 3,200 Words
• Fact-Checking American Pravda: The KKK and Mass Racial Killings • 4,800 Words

A similar sort of serious AI error appeared regarding another one of my 2016 American Pravda articles, describing the nefarious activities of British intelligence agents during the 1940 American presidential election:

AI: British intelligence “had played a massive hidden role in getting America involved in WWII” and may have murdered a top Republican Party official while secretly steering the GOP nominating process…the specific claim of murdering a top Republican official has no solid evidence. Unz phrases it as Cockburn’s uncertain phrasing…Mahl’s book (and other sources) do not document any confirmed British assassination of a U.S. politician. What appears relevant is that a Republican convention manager (a Taft supporter) died suddenly in mid-1940 (just before Willkie’s nomination), which Mahl implies was suspicious….The Unz claim seems to exaggerate Mahl’s hint that British agents were even “warned” murder might be needed…but the specific “murdered GOP official” assertion is unsubstantiated speculation.

No mainstream account reports outright murder plots. Conclusion: Unverified/unsupported by mainstream sources. Willkie’s nomination was unusual, but the alleged sabotage is not documented outside Mahl/Unz. At most, there was a sudden death of a Taft organizer (not proven as foul play). We rate this claim inaccurate (no credible evidence of British spy rigging the convention in the wild manner described).

Unz: On p. 160, Mahl describes the sudden death of Ralph E. Williams, the pro-Taft Republican Arrangements Convention Manager, that “allowed the Willkie forces to take control of the mechanics of the convention” and thereby nominate their candidate. Later in that same paragraph, Mahl explains that the British operatives recruited to gain control of the Republican Party and nominate Willkie were warned that they “mustn’t be afraid of murder.” In footnote n. 19, Mahl explains that he unsuccessfully attempted to gain access to the autopsy report on Williams, which he believes “deserves a thorough review by a forensic specialist knowledgeable in the intelligence techniques of the time.” All of this supports my careful phrasing that Mahl suggests “that British spies…very possibly murdered a top Republican Party official.”

Thomas Mahl is a reputable historian and his monograph was his Kent State Ph.D. dissertation, later published in a fully respectable academic series, so Mahl himself is certainly a mainstream source. Admittedly, his research seems to provide the only coverage of these extremely controversial claims, but that’s another matter entirely. Indeed, the AI itself mentions that “Trusted histories (e.g. Gil Troy’s biography of Willkie) note that Willkie barely campaigned and won, surprising many.”

• American Pravda: Alexander Cockburn and the British Spies
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 29, 2016 • 2,700 Words
• Fact-Checking American Pravda: Alexander Cockburn and the British Spies • 4,000 Words

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The post Fact-Checking appeared first on LewRockwell.

But all bubbles pop, and there are no tricks left to fund both the greed of the few and the needs of the many.

Every society / economy is a distribution mechanism that distributes:

1. Gains

2. Losses

3. Risk

4. The costs of securing the sources of gains.

As a general rule, markets / economies don’t really care who ends up with the losses, and this is why markets / economies are fundamentally pathological structures: the single-minded focus is to maximize gains and minimize costs and losses by distributing them to others by any means available.

As a general rule, societies have to manage the distribution in a slightly less pathological manner to keep the status quo from being overthrown by those forced to bear the costs and losses. As Mao famously observed, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and so the sociopaths sluicing the gains into their own pockets and dumping the costs and losses on the economically / politically powerless without regard for social stability find the way of the Tao is reversal as those getting the crumbs eventually have nothing left to lose.

In other words, markets / economies are embedded in a social structure, not the other way round. And the social structure has to balance the distribution fairly enough to keep the majority from concluding they have nothing left to lose by throwing their lot into overthrowing the status quo.

We can gussy this structure up with a lot of theorizing and references to Plato, Marx and Machiavelli and hundreds of other players in the longstanding drama, but these are the fundamental forces in play: do the sociopaths have enough political and financial power to channel most of the gains to themselves and dump the costs and losses on others, or is the system capable of enforcing some limits on the sociopaths?

I submit that the United States is in the firm grip of the single-minded few focused solely on maximizing their gains and distributing costs and losses to others by any means available. The social and political restraints that placed modest limits on the aggregation of power and wealth into the hands of the few have crumbled, and this structural collapse has been hidden behind flimsy billboards hyping the latest in distractions: AI, tariffs, stablecoins, Rich Mom fashions, etc.

These flimsy distractions are about to be blown over by the windstorm of recession and social disorder as the American households clinging on to the fantasy of The American Dream as all the costs and losses are dumped on them as the gains flow to the top 10% finally throw in the towel on the status quo.

The entire bloated, distorted beast has been living on buy now, pay later skims and scams, and the debt pushers have turned enough of the populace into debt-junkies that there’s few new customers left to addict.

The entire travesty of a mockery of a sham is out of balance and cannot be restored with the usual magic tricks. The interests of the citizenry–supposedly represented by elected officials–have been trampled underfoot by a thundering herd of fraud, swindles and corruption, the means by which the sociopaths control the distribution of gains, losses, costs and risks.

This systemic dominance of fraud, swindles and corruption has been not just normalized but hyper-normalized: we all know the entire system is hopelessly compromised by corruption, but since we’re powerless to change this distribution, we act as if this is normal, and go about our business, debating AGI (artificial general intelligence) and other absurdities to pass our time while we await the inevitable reversal of fortunes.

Here is the real distribution of gains, losses, costs and risks in America: the gains go to the most corrupt few and the losses, costs and risks are distributed to the many. Here are three of the latest manifestations of fraud, swindles and corruption among a seemingly countless stream of self-serving outrages that are no longer outrages, they’re just the way things work now.

Here’s how Corporate America takes care of its customers: the gains are ours, the risks are yours. It’s taboo to call things what they are, so we can’t say that Corporate America is pathological–even when it is:

A Devastating New Expose of Johnson & Johnson Indicts an Entire System.

Revealed: UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers.

Owner-Occupancy Fraud and Mortgage Performance. (rampant mortgage fraud… again)

As always, I am honored to share a remarkable data base of Corporate Fines and Settlements from the early 1990s to the present compiled by Jon Morse. There are 2700 entries, updated through December 2024.

What’s finally happening is the system can no longer collect enough resources to fund the minimum required to satisfy the sociopaths and the minimum required to satisfy the bottom 90%, so something’s gotta give. The solution has always been straightforward: print or borrow another couple trillion dollars to fund the greed of the sociopaths and whatever it takes to keep the herd from stampeding.

Read the Whole Article

The post Ours Is a System of Fraud, Swindles and Corruption appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the last seven days the Ukrainian military has launched over one thousand drones against targets in Russia. Most of these were shot down by Russian air defenses. There are no reports of any serious damage.

The biggest effect the week long drone attacks achieved was to shut down air traffic in Moscow for several hours.

After waiting a few days the Russian military responded in kind.

Over the last three days a record number of drones and missiles were launched against military installations and production facilities in Ukraine (archived):

Russia stepped up missile-and-drone assaults on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and other regions, killing at least 12 people overnight into Sunday after President Trump last week declined to impose further sanctions on Moscow over its refusal to halt its invasion.

Russia attacked with a total of 367 drones and missiles—one of the largest single-night raids of the war, according to the Ukrainian Air Force—in a second consecutive day of pounding strikes that sent civilians running for shelters in the middle of the night.

Over three days the Russian forces used some 1,000 heavy drones plus 58 cruise- and 31 ballistic-missiles to attack Ukraine.

The Russian attacks are overwhelming (archived) the western provided air defenses:

A YEAR AGO, for 30 drones to strike Ukraine in a single night was considered exceptional. Now Russia is saturating Ukraine’s air defences with hundreds of them. On May 25th the Kremlin pummelled the country, with what it called a “massive strike” against Ukrainian cities, featuring 298 drones, probably a record.

Russia is using more missiles, too: 69 were fired on the same night. As a result, Ukraine is once again stepping into the unknown. If the current ceasefire talks fail, which seems highly probable, air-defence units will need to ration their interceptors. More Russian missiles and drones will get through, to strike towns, cities and critical industry.
…
Last year the Kremlin was producing around 300 Shahed drones a month; the same number now rolls out in under three days. Ukrainian military intelligence says it has documents that suggest that Russia plans to increase its drone production to 500 a day, suggesting that attack swarms of 1,000 could become a reality.

The Russian forces are now using the sixth iteration of the Shahed drones. These now carry a 90 kilogram explosive load, fly much higher than previously and are less sensitive to electronic countermeasures (machine translation):

The tactics of using “Shahids” are also changing.

“Now their UAVs are attacking in swarms. Before the attack, ten or fifteen “Shaheds” cut several circles at a distance from the target, at a great distance and altitude of up to four thousand meters, actually out of the zone of destruction of our air defense. Then the “Shaheds” attack targets, diving from a high altitude. At the same time, they are clearly controlled remotely, which indicates that the UAVs are equipped with EW-protected communication complexes with command posts. Because of the new tactics, the effectiveness of eliminating enemy UAVs by means of our air defense systems is sharply reduced, ” said officer N., who serves in the Air Defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

To be more terrifying Shahid drones now have the wailing sound (1st vid) of Stuka sirens attached to them.

Number of Shahed drones launched against Ukraine

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While the drones keep the air defenses busy ballistic missiles and cruise missiles push through.

Ukraine has reportedly eight Patriot missile systems which cover the capital Kiev. (On Saturday at least one (2nd vid) was destroyed in a Russian attack.)

Ammunition for Patriot air defenses are running out:

Lockheed Martin, which builds the Patriot systems and their PAC-3s, is increasing its output to 650 missiles per year. But this is about 100 fewer than projected Russian production of ballistic missiles, with a Ukraine government source estimating the Kremlin has a 500-missile stockpile. It usually takes two PAC-3 interceptor missiles to intercept a Russian ballistic missile.

Supplies for other air defense systems have also run dry (archived):

The growing number of projectiles; their diversity (drones, cruise and ballistic missiles); and the complexity of their flight paths are overwhelming Ukraine’s air defense capabilities. In 2024, Ukraine managed to mitigate damage by implementing a multi-layered system combining numerous light mobile units equipped with anti-aircraft guns, medium and long-range missile batteries, helicopters, fighter jets and a network of jammers spoofing satellite coordinates received by incoming projectiles. In 2024, the destruction or diversion rate for Shahed drones often exceeded 90%. That is no longer the case; today, the rate sometimes drops to 30%.
…
A source told Le Monde that Ukraine no longer has missiles for its two SAMP/T batteries and “has not received a single missile in a year and a half” for the short-range Crotale air defense system.
…
“We are running out of missiles,” said Ihnat. “There are several Patriot divisions around Kyiv. But they cannot provide 100% protection against ballistic missiles. One battery only covers a radius of 25 kilometers. The Russians have found countermeasures: Iskander missiles perform evasive maneuvers in the final phase, avoiding the Patriot’s trajectory calculations. In addition, the Iskander can release decoys capable of fooling Patriot missiles.”

The relentless improvement of weapons and tactics has given rise to a breathless duel between sword and shield. The sword clearly has the upper hand today. Under attack, Ukraine has responded by ramping up its own aerial campaign against Russia, currently launching over 100 drones per night. The escalation appears inexorable.

It is an escalation which the Ukraine has no chance to win.

But there are still propagandists who claim to differ (archived):

Russia’s battlefield strength in Ukraine has started to wane and it could run into serious shortages of manpower and weaponry by next year, even as President Donald Trump retreats from pressure on Moscow to end the war, according to senior U.S. and European officials and military experts.

These reports border on being laughable (archived):

When Russia failed to deliver a knock-out blow in 2022 and to split Ukraine down the middle, Putin had a choice between a reduced war and a war on civilians across Ukraine. He went with the war against civilians—not to be seen as backtracking and to compel Ukrainians to surrender. This decision also backfired. The brutality of the Russian occupation coupled with countless assaults on civilians and civilian .

However, no numbers to support such statements are ever delivered.

As of end of April the UN reported some 13,000 killed civilians killed in Ukraine during more than three years of war.

During a night in which Russia fires more than 350 drones and ballistic missiles while Ukraine uses all air defenses it has against those, a loss of 12 civilians, as reported yesterday, is tragic but a very, very low rate.

In July 1943 the U.S. and Britain launched a week long air raid on the city I live in. Some 50,000 died and 200,000 were wounded; half of its houses burned down.

It shows how ridiculous claims like these are:

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The picture General Kellogg attached to demonstrated the claimed “indiscriminate killing of women and children at night” shows the burning Antonov aircraft manufacturing facility in Kiev which was hit Friday night. The facility had been used to produce fixed wing drones for the Ukrainian military.

At the front line Russian troops use first-person-view (FPV) drone directed through fiber wire and thus insensitive to electronic counter measures. Up to 40 kilometers behind the front line Russian drones, controlled through flying radio relay station, manage to harass Ukrainian logistics. Beyond that long range drones, like the Shaheds, engage industrial targets in swarm attacks.

There are also more and more specialized drones to drop bombs or mines. Others, flying high, are used for reconnaissance and to direct artillery. Still others are launched (vid) to directly attack incoming enemy drones.

A Ukrainian soldier describes the consequences (machine translation):

“Meat assaults, when the Russians threw their own into frontal attacks on our positions without the support of drones, although still sometimes occur, but less and less often. Now the assaults mostly start in a different way. First, the Russians launch reconnaissance drones. Then our positions are bombarded with KAB and tightly covered with artillery. Then the Russians immediately lift into the air shock FPV drones, which accurately crumble everything that is left to move after the shelling. They have more and more fiber-based attack drones, which are not hindered by any anti-drone means. And only after that they throw assault groups of 4-5 soldiers on motorcycles and ATVs, or just on foot, whose task is to get to our strongpoints and clear the positions. At the same time, if a year ago we had a clear advantage in UAVs, now we have at least parity, and in some areas the Russian Federation has a very significant advantage. Especially worryingly, the range of strikes is increasing. Drones are already hitting for several tens of kilometers, destroying our logistics in entire directions, ” says UAV platoon sergeant K.

Over the last weeks Russia has introduced several drone innovations. It has increased their production to never before seen levels. It is unlikely to stop here.

Anyone who thinks of countering it should consider where Russian drone capabilities will be next year and beyond.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The post A Week Long Drone Fight Which Russia Is Winning appeared first on LewRockwell.

It’s pretty universally acknowledged that America’s recent wars — say, starting with Vietnam — have been stupid, pointless, and fake in instigation. And yet the soldiers we sent into these fiascos acted bravely and honorably for the most part. So, it has felt a little weird to celebrate their sacrifices minus any sense of political justice, victory, or meaning in the endeavors they sacrificed for. Ergo, the holiday is lately reduced to a celebration of grilled meat.

This Memorial Day, for a change, the USA is not actively at war in some distant land, only against ourselves. One faction in this as yet cold civil war seeks to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and the other side seeks what. . . ? To do the opposite of that? Make America Disintegrate (MAD). It’s hard to come to another conclusion.

MAGA is led, of course, by Mr. Trump, president again after the strangest executive interregnum in our history. At its plainest, MAGA means returning to an economy based on producing things of value. To many, this might conjure up the image of humming factories, good pay for honest work, and a well-ordered, content, patriotic populace grateful for their prosperity, in other words, something like the America of 1958, when Mr. Trump was entering puberty.

It’s a comforting vision. Parts of it seem possible to achieve. Maybe we can rebuild an industrial infrastructure of up-to-date factories. Didn’t we voluntarily deep-six all the old ones only a few decades ago? And for what reason? So that faraway nations rising out of darkness could make all the stuff we wanted at a fraction of the cost? Turned out to be a bad bargain based on supremely foolish short-term thinking.

It also came with a set of very corrosive financial arrangements based on the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. These are pretty abstruse, but suffice it to say they enabled us to rack up phenomenal debt that we will never be able to pay off. We even fooled ourselves into thinking that we could replace that old economy of factory production with financial games based on jiggering interest rates and innovating ever more complex swindles. That merely produced a fantastic divide between the financial gamesters raking in billions while the former factory workers were left broke, demoralized, sick, and strung-out on drugs.

As a basic proposition, it’s doubtful that we can return to anything like a 1958 disposition of things based on rising continental-scale enterprise, as in the Big Three automakers and General Foods. It all seemed like a good idea at the time, and the zeitgeist pushed it, but we can see where it landed us: in the ghastly suburban sprawl clusterfuck and the overall ill health of the people. Also the scale of things is done rising; is, in fact, contracting.

And yet we are surely lurching into a new disposition of things, probably featuring a reduced population (disease and infertility induced by the Covid vaccine op), falling energy production (despite the whoop to drill-baby-drill), and much smaller-scaled, re-localized production of goods and food — if we’re lucky. (Events are in the driver’s seat, not personalities, even gigantic ones like Mr. Trump’s.) If we’re not lucky, the disorders of change itself may overwhelm our ability to remain civilized.

The MAD faction is led by the Democratic Party, the party of Hoaxes, Hustles, and Hatred. Being more a religious cult (of envy, grievance, and revenge) than a political faction, this Memorial Day they celebrate their patron saint George Floyd, a fake martyr whose death by fentanyl overdose sparked a summer of looting, arson, and homicide followed by a fraud-saturated election.

The Black Lives Matter operation proved to be hustle, that is, an effort to extract money dishonestly. But it morphed into the even more pervasive DEI op, seeping into every institution of American life and contaminating each of them with incompetence and grift, larded with sanctimony. That’s over now, but what is the MAD Democratic Party left with? It has put itself at the service of the depraved Deep State, the rogue permanent bureaucracy that has developed a malevolent hive-mind dedicated to maintaining its perquisites at all costs. In other words, it is vested solely in power. . . power over the people of this land. . . to dominate, regulate, asset-strip, and punish for the crime of wishing to be civilized.

The MAD party is on the wane now. Its insanity has become so exorbitant that no one of healthy sensibility can bear to be associated with it. Those who remain involved in Democratic Party politics are largely those liable to prosecution for manifold crimes against the country, now using the most unprincipled dregs of the legal system to keep them out of prison. The party will be defeated utterly.

The Deep State it served is getting disassembled systematically by MAGA, deprived of funding, de-staffed, shut down. It has nothing left but lawfare and a claque of judges who will lose their battle with legitimate law and the Constitution. If it attempts to revive its street-fighting proxies this summer, that too will get shut down swiftly and harshly. Lessons will be learned. All of which is to say that the Deep State’s war against the American people could be drawing to a close. That is something to be grateful for this Memorial Day.

MAGA will then be left to battle with the forces of nature, which basically means physics, especially as applied to the mechanisms of money. MAGA could easily founder if it fails to face the current deformities of finance, namely the gross, untenable debt hanging over the country. I’m not so optimistic about how that might work out.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post The War on Us appeared first on LewRockwell.

It seems that, for President Donald Trump, the key for economic growth is demand for goods and services. In this view, the greater the demand, the greater the supply is via production and consumer spending, and thus the greater the economic growth. Now, part of the demand for domestically-produced goods and services originates from overseas. The meeting of this demand is called exports. Additionally, local residents exercise demand for goods and services produced overseas, which are imports.

According to this view, an increase in exports and a reduction in imports (i.e., the improvement in the trade balance) strengthens overall demand for domestically-produced goods and services. As a result, this strengthens economic growth in terms of the gross domestic product (GDP). Therefore, the rationale follows that the imposition of tariffs that curtails imports will greatly benefit the US economy.

Let us say that, out of an additional dollar received, individuals spend $0.90 and save $0.10. Now, let us also assume that, because of the imposition of tariffs on imports, the demand for locally-produced goods increased by $100 million. The recipients of the $100 million consume 90 percent of the $100 million (i.e., they raise expenditure on goods by $90 million). The recipients of the $90 million spend, in turn, 90 percent of the $90 million (i.e., $81 million). Then the recipients of the $81 million spend 90 percent of this sum, which is $72.9 million, and so on. Note that the key feature here is that the spending by one person becomes the income of another person. At each stage in the spending chain, the assumption is that individuals spend 90 percent of the additional income they receive. This process eventually ends, with the total gross domestic product (GDP) increasing by $1 billion (10 x $100 million) (i.e. by the multiple of 10).

It seems that President Trump believes that if money is spent locally, it will benefit the American economy massively. It would appear that the US president follows in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, who is alleged to have said,

I do not know much about the tariff. I do know that when I buy a coat from England, I have a coat and England has the money. But when I buy a coat in America, I have the coat and America has the money.

Production and Demand

The imposition of tariffs in order to curb imports and thus strengthen the demand for US-produced goods and services will not strengthen the local production of goods and services without the enhanced structure of production. At any point in time, it is the stock of savings and accumulated capital goods that allows for economic growth.

The enhancement and the expansion of the infrastructure is what sets in motion economic growth. The enhancement and the expansion of the infrastructure, in turn, is only possible because of prior saving that sustains producers through the period of production. Hence, anything that weakens saving and development of capital structure undermines the prospects for economic growth.

An increase in demand for locally-produced goods and services because of the imposition of tariffs—without the time-intensive development of a domestic structure of production to produce those goods and services—will ultimately divert resources from wealth-generating activities. This will undermine the formation of savings, thus weakening economic growth.

We must also remember that it is not the “US” that imports and/or exports goods and services, but individuals who live in the US. For example, it is not the “US” that exports wheat, but a particular farmer or a group of farmers who want to sell at agreed-upon prices to willing buyers in another country. They are engaged in the exports of wheat because they expect to profit. Likewise, it is not the “US” that imports Chinese electrical appliances, but individuals from the US. They import these appliances because they want them. In a market economy, each individual sells goods and services for money and uses money to buy desired goods and services. The goods and services sold by individuals could be called their “exports” while the goods and services bought could be called their “imports.”

In a free market economy, individuals’ decisions regarding buying and selling goods and services (i.e. their exports and imports) is made voluntarily, otherwise it would not occur. The emergence of an exchange between individuals implies that they expect to benefit from it. According to Rothbard, “There is therefore never a need for anyone to worry about anyone else’s balance of payments.”

The current practice of lumping individuals’ trade balances into a national trade balance is of little relevance to businesses. What possible interest can an entrepreneur have with the national trade account balance? Will it assist him in the conduct of his business? According to Mises,

While an individual’s balance of payments conveys exhaustive information about his social position, a group’s balance discloses much less. It says nothing about the mutual relations between the members of the group. The greater the group is and the less homogeneous its members are, the more defective is the information vouchsafed by the balance of payments.

While the national trade account balance is of little economic significance to businesses, individual or company trade balances carry economic importance. For instance, the trade account balance statement of a particular company could be of help to various investors.

The fallacy of the national trade account balance is also relevant to the national foreign debt. If an American lends money to an Australian, the entire transaction is their own private affair and should not be of any concern to anyone else. Lumping individuals’ foreign debt into the total national foreign debt is a questionable practice. What is this total supposed to mean? Who owns this debt? What about all those individuals who do not have foreign debt? Should they also be responsible for the national foreign debt?

The only situation with which individuals should be concerned regarding foreign debt is when the government incurs the debt. The government is not a wealth-generating unit and, as such, derives its livelihood from the private sector. Consequently, any foreign government debt incurred means that the private sector will have to foot the bill in the present and sometime in the future.

Conclusion

What drives the tariffs policies of the US president is a concern that the trade deficit undermines the growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Government and central bank policies designed to reduce the trade deficit can only lead to the misallocation of resources and the lowering of living standards.

The post What Is the Rationale Behind Current US Tariff Policy? appeared first on LewRockwell.