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Deal-making is said to be President Trump’s specialty, yet after five rounds of indirect talks with Iran – most recently just days ago – we seem as far away from an agreement as ever. The fifth round ended last Friday with no breakthrough, but at least no breakdown. However, each day that passes without a document signed on the table is another day for the neocons to maneuver the US president toward an attack on Iran.

One way the war party does this is to continuously move the goal posts and change the rules of the game. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, under great pressure from the neocons, has himself signaled at least three position-shifts: from no enrichment at all, to low-level enrichment for civilian uses, back to no enrichment at all.

The neocons know that Iran will not give up its right to the civilian use of nuclear power and that is why they are applying maximum pressure to force Trump to officially adopt that position. They know if that becomes the US “red line” then they will win and they will get their war.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in league with US neocons, has been warning us for 20 years that Iran is “months away” from a nuclear weapon – even though our own Intelligence Community recently re-affirmed that Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon at all.

Of course this is the same Netanyahu who promised Congress in 2002 if the US would just invade Iraq, peace and prosperity would break out in the Middle East. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime,” he told Congress in March of that year, “I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

We know how that worked out.

Poll after poll shows that the American people are tired of intervention and tired of Middle East wars. President Trump himself recognized this in his scathing rebuke of neocons and interventionists during a recent speech in Saudi Arabia.

But rebuke in a speech is not enough. President Trump must actively turn away from the neocons – many of whom are prominent in his own administration.

The recent US debacle in Yemen – where billions were wasted, civilians killed, and US military equipment destroyed – is just a taste of what the US would be in for if the neocons get their way and take us to war with Iran.

The Iranian foreign minister laid down in the simplest terms how the impasse could be solved, posting on X that, “Zero nuclear weapons = we DO have a deal; Zero enrichment = we do NOT have a deal.

My own preference is non-intervention and I do not believe Iran has the desire or the ability to militarily harm the United States. I share President Trump’s view that it would be far better to re-establish relations with Iran and begin mutually beneficial trade with the country. But if a mutually acceptable nuclear deal is the best way to take the neocon war with Iran off the table, then a deal is worth supporting.

President Trump should make his position clear to his negotiators: no more waffling or contradictions, get this agreement signed and put one in the “win” column.

The post Take the Deal, President Trump appeared first on LewRockwell.

In Chapter Two of The Quiet American narrator Thomas Fowler, like author Graham Greene a war-weary British journalist, watches in horror as young CIA agent Thomas Pyle orchestrates a disaster. Pyle has just arrived in Vietnam from Harvard and follows an anticommunist playbook in backing the dubious General Thé, who blows up a street full of women and children instead of soldiers:

“He said, ‘Thé wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists…’

He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance. I left him standing in the square and went on up the rue Catinat to where the hideous pink Cathedral blocked the way.

The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s fifteenth novel, was published in 1955. The novel is equal parts epitaph for Britain’s empire, love story, battlefield diary, and spy thriller (a real-life MI6 agent, Greene wrote four or five of the best spy novels ever). What makes it so uncannily relevant to the present is his merciless dissection of Pyle and his “good intentions.” Perhaps without even intending it, Greene with his seething description of the meddling American “Economic Aid Mission” adviser published one of the first portraits of a figure destined to rule the world, the managerial expert.

A brilliant prose stylist whose extensive travels gave us exotic locales for novels set everywhere from the Caribbean to Africa to Asia to Central and South America, Greene in the first part of The Quiet American spends more time on sour grapes than politics. Fowler, Greene’s aging, opium-smoking English narrator, is in love with a 20-year-old Vietnamese beauty named Phuong (which, he says, “means Phoenix, but nothing nowadays… rises from its ashes”). With the prescience of all inadequate lovers, Fowler knew the virile-if-moronic, sober, hygiene-obsessed Pyle would spot Phuong and take Fowler’s place with her the way America was then taking Britain’s place everywhere. True, Pyle had no game at all, romancing Phuong with lectures on America and the promise of Democracy while his ideas about sex seemed to come from a book called The Physiology of Marriage. Still, Pyle had the one thing Fowler never would again: power, of both the political and sexual kind.

Fowler urges Phuong to get Pyle on the opium pipe to help even the odds, but probably knowing that will fail, tries to console himself with a truism. “A man’s sexual capacity might be injured by smoking,” Fowler writes, “but [the Vietnamese] would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.” Of course it doesn’t turn out that way, especially once Pyle promises to marry Phuong, elevating Fowler’s resentment and desperation to new levels. Will he have to kill for love in the end?

Fowler’s portrait of Pyle starts out as a humdrum compound of jealousy and Oxonian snobbery — he hates Pyle because he’s a winner and his idea of a good book is The Advance of Red China — but in his callow Euro resentment discovers the real danger of America. Pyle is an overgrown schoolboy whose belief in American know-how and can-do spirit runs deeper and is more full of absurd religious certitude than the British royalists who circled the world murdering for King and country. Greene knew the executors of European colonialism were raised from university age to be rakes and buggerers who knew more poetry than policy, which created its own set of problems but at least immunized them from the most dangerous disease of all: moral confidence. “God save us always,” Fowler says, “from the innocent and good.”

Greene reportedly spent two years in Vietnam beginning in 1951 and parts of several others before publishing in the mid-fifties. The Quiet American predicted twenty years of mayhem, death, and cultural upheaval and in 1975, when it was “all over but the writing,” American Herbert Mitgang went looking for Greene’s inspiration in what was still Saigon. He spoke to retired General Edward Lansdale, a longtime intelligence presence and “adviser on matters of pacification” who was rumored to be Greene’s model for Pyle. “I used to see Greene sitting around the Rue Catinat,” Lansdale said. “I had the feeling that Greene was anti‐American.”

He was right about that. Americans in Greene’s novels are universally savaged as blundering nitwits, from The Presidential Candidate in The Comedians who thinks he can end Haitian violence through vegetarianism to the CIA man in Travels With My Aunt who records how much time he spends urinating per day in a journal. Greene served in MI6 as a deputy under infamous double-agent Kim Philby, and like Philby, flirted with Communism in youth, and repeatedly rationalized Philby’s treason late in life. “Who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?” he wrote, in an introduction to Philby’s memoir. Greene even wrote an unnervingly convincing novel (The Human Factor) about a British official so repulsed by America’s alliance with South African apartheid that he spied for the Russians.

In hindsight, even if Greene hated Americans for other reasons, he may have been giving the USAID-style managerial expert too much credit for “good intentions.” Nonetheless, The Quiet American nailed a new kind of world conqueror, one bursting with what Iggy Pop called “plans for everyone,” while simultaneously being too ignorant of everything outside of his American head — language, customs, local personalities — to competently run anything. Because this new character also lacked any capacity for self-doubt, he never knew when to withdraw and doubled down until he found himself blowing up women and children for the “greater good.” Maybe it’s coincidence, but we’ve never had more to fear from the Pyles of the world.

Walter and I will delve more into part one of The Quiet American at 4 pm ET today.

This article was originally published on Racket News.

The post ‘The Quiet American’ Has Never Been More Relevant appeared first on LewRockwell.

We are immersed in an era dominated by misinformation and the constant noise of fabricated narratives. Rarely does a testimony as disturbing and charged with implications emerge as that found in The Great Taking, written by David Webb. This book not only unravels the invisible threads of global financial power, but also raises profound questions about who—or what—is truly in charge of this world, an idea also echoed by World Bank CEO Karen Judes. Is the architect of this oppressive system human? Or, as David Webb suggests, could it be something darker and more complex, something beyond our understanding?

What is The Great Taking?

David Webb, an Oxford mathematician, investor, activist, and programmer, has spent decades studying the hidden mechanisms of power. His work explores what he describes as “the expropriation of collateral,” that is, the systematic confiscation of all financial assets, property, assets, and even intellectual property. According to Webb, this process is not an accident or an unintended consequence of the modern economy, but a meticulously designed plan to consolidate absolute control in the hands of a few. These words are not far-fetched at all; let us recall, at the beginning of the False Pandemic, the famous Great Reset proposed by the former president of the International Economic Forum, Mr. Klaus Schwab, and his famous phrase that “in 2030 you will own nothing and be happy.”

It is the end of a globally synchronized cycle of debt accumulation. Now everything is debt. This has been initiated through a very clever, well-planned, and long-term plan. It is an audacious project, with a scope that is difficult to comprehend. The structure is complex and only a few minds understand it in its entirety.

It includes all assets: financial assets, bank deposits, stocks, bonds, and all underlying property of public corporations, including inventories, plants, equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions, intellectual property, and absolutely everything. Private assets and real estate, financed by any level of debt, will also be expropriated. Private companies financed by debt will have even less chance, forming part of a larger strategy by a secret group seeking the greatest subjugation in world history.

In reality, this is a kind of hybrid war, conducted by deception, designed to achieve very broad objectives. Previously, conventional wars were the norm; today, it is about systems of control with minimal energy expenditure. The enemy is no longer states, but all of humanity.

The strict private control of all central banks and monetary creation has allowed a few individuals to control political parties, governments, intelligence agencies, armed forces, police forces, large corporations, and the media. These people, primarily the instigators of this plan, have operated for decades and in complete secrecy.

But here comes the most disturbing part: Webb suggests that those orchestrating this grand takeover may not be human. Citing figures like George Soros, who once said, “You don’t know what these beings can do!“, the author suggests that there is something beyond the visible. Superhuman intelligences? Beings operating from the shadows, using people as mere puppets? The questions remain, but the implications are profound.

These beings are hidden behind those who control this war against humanity. We may never know who they really are, even those in high command, as they could be other intelligences or entities using public figures and media to give the appearance of control. In reality, those at the top are not the true perpetrators. What they seek is to seize all your property, even the ones you thought were yours, through their centralized digital currency, limiting your purchases and freedoms.

The Mechanism of Financial Control

Webb explains how money has been turned into an extremely efficient tool of social domination. Through monetary incentives, people self-manage without the need for direct physical coercion. This allows the powers that be to maintain their influence with minimal energy expenditure. However, when this system fails—as in financial crises—physical control comes into play.

Great powers always talk about the media, states, and governments that depend on them, and use the phrase: “the right to security.” As Machiavelli said, “Never attempt to gain by force what you can achieve by deceit.” The greatest historical manipulation has been based on that lie, on the concept of “security.” We are told: “For your security, we will do this or that.” In future financial panics, it will be like a game of musical chairs: when the music stops, many will not have seats. Uncontrolled financing seeks to create the threat of collapses and offer continuous profits, controlling nations in the process. A historical example Webb uses is the Great Depression of 1933 in the United States. During that period, banks were closed by decree, leaving millions of people without access to their savings. Here’s an anecdote Webb tells:

My Aunt Elizabeth was 10 years old when the banks were closed by decree in 1933. When I asked her to tell me about that Great Depression, she told me that suddenly no one had any money. That even wealthy families had no money and had to take their children out of private schools because they couldn’t afford the tuition. I also asked her why even those wealthy families couldn’t send their children back to school after the banks reopened. And the answer she gave me was this: only Federal Reserve banks and banks selected by the Federal Reserve were allowed to reopen. People with money in banks that weren’t allowed to reopen lost everything. However, their debts weren’t canceled. They were assumed by other banks. That is, they take away all your savings, all your property, and leave you with debts.

Only those banks selected by the Federal Reserve were able to reopen, while the rest collapsed. The wealthy families who had accounts in those banks lost everything, but their debts remained intact. These debts were absorbed by the surviving banks, which then foreclosed and seized property en masse.

This strategy not only allowed the banks to consolidate, but also transformed the former owners into perpetual tenants. It was a massive upward transfer of wealth, disguised under the guise of “stabilizing the economy.” Today, according to Webb, we are witnessing a repeat of this pattern, but amplified on a global scale.” (Something we have discussed in other articles on this Substack.)

Read the Whole Article

The post Global Control and Dystopian Future appeared first on LewRockwell.

Progressives do not seem to understand the dramatic societal transformation that is occurring among young people searching for meaning in an increasingly chaotic culture. Failing to recognize these changes, David Hogg, the clueless Democratic National Committee Vice Chair, recently told an interviewer that young people just want to “get laid and have fun.”

The truth is that Gen Z is rejecting the kind of life that Hogg is promoting, preferring instead to find meaning in authentic relationships and traditional institutions. A growing number of them are finding meaning in Catholicism. A recent Harvard University survey revealed a significant increase in the percentage of Gen Z identifying as Catholic, with numbers climbing from 15 to 21 percent from 2022 to 2023. Even Millennials are increasingly identifying as Catholic, going from 6 percent to 20 percent during that same time period.

Rejecting the conclusion that Hogg proposed, young people find that the Catholic Church is filling an emptiness that Hogg cannot understand. Hogg—whose only claim to fame is that he was a student who witnessed a school shooting in Parkland, Florida—has parlayed his anger and bitterness into a career based primarily on lobbying for gun control. Recently, Hogg became a big problem for the Democratic Party when he suggested that the DNC needed to mount primary challenges to those Democrats who are not “woke” enough to appeal to young people.

It is not likely that Hogg will continue in his current position at the DNC because he is so out of touch with the mainstream culture. Hogg does not seem to understand that “wokeness” cannot give meaning to one’s life. Wokeness is not a religion, even though it may be the only source of meaning he seems to have been able to find in his life. Unlike Hogg, most members of Gen Z know that wokeness will never provide the kind of meaning that they are searching for, and an increasing number of them are turning to traditional religion.

This is a global phenomenon. Figures released by the Bishops’ Conference of France announced that 10,384 adults received the sacrament of baptism at the 2025 Easter Vigil. This is an increase of 45 percent over the 7,135 adults who were baptized in 2024 and a 90 percent increase over the 5,463 adults who were baptized in 2023.

According to Église Catholique en France,

13 dioceses (more than 10 percent of all dioceses in France) have more than doubled the number of baptized adults. In ten years, catechumens in France have increased from 3,900 in 2015 to 10,392 in 2025. This is an increase of more than 160 percent. 

Among the new adult catechumens, the 18–25-year-old cohort accounts for more than 42 percent of the catechumens and is surpassing the 26–40 age group. Among the new adult catechumens, the 1

Social media is helpful in trying to understand this cultural shift toward traditional religion. Recent convert to Catholicism Cameron Bertuzzi, a 38-year-old host of what was once a Protestant YouTube channel, said that he was moved to Catholicism after becoming convinced—through his reading and his engaging in online Catholic content, including Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire—that the traditional religion held the answers he was looking for.

This speaks directly to what Pope St. John Paul II called the “New Evangelization.” While it is hardly “new,” considering the fact that the pontiff created this concept in 1983, it is an evangelization that involves adapting to the current culture and engaging in cultural dialogue about the beauty and the truth of the Faith. The New Evangelization has three qualities: new means, new expressions, and new ardor; and although Pope John Paul II could never have anticipated almost 40 years ago the role of the Internet and social media in his ideas for a new evangelization, many new Gen Z converts point to their conversion as resulting from their exposure to what some Catholics used to be a bit embarrassed to call “Catholic Apologetics.”

Read the Whole Article

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Our friend, Lawrence Leopard, framed Friday’s Trumpian insanity about as well as possible:

Scott Bessent in the Oval Office:

SB: sir, we are losing the bond market, the Japanese 40 year is going parabolic and the US 10yr is creeping higher…

Trump: you’re the expert what do you recommend?

SB: sir, we need another tariff scare tohit the stock market and drive money into bonds. How about we hit Apple with 25% and the Europeans with 50%. That ought to do it.

Trump: OK let me just tell Lutnick so he can front run it.

Well, we don’t know how else to explain the Donald’s early Friday AM eruption on social media. He was apparently pissed off because his “art of the deal” posturing on trade has not produced the results he was delusionally expecting.

In response to the huge China tariffs, Apple has been frantically moving its production not back to the US of A as Trump has promised, but to India and Vietnam. So he took Tim Cook, Apple Inc’s CEO, to the woodshed, threatening a 25% tariff on Apple products brought into the US:

I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday. I said to him, ‘Tim you’re my friend, I treated you very good. You’re coming in with $500 billion, but now you’re building all over India. I don’t want you building in India,’” Trump said. “I said, ‘Tim, look, we’ve treated you really good. We’ve put up with all the plants that you built in China for years. Now, you gotta build in the US. We’re not interested in you building in India. India can take care of themselves. They’re doing very well. We want you to build here…

If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.” he continued. Thank your for your attention to this matter!

Likewise, the potential massive “reciprocal tariff” on the EU-27 has not brought EU officialdom crawling to Washington on their collective bellies, chanting “Sir, how can we throw our powerful trade associations and unions under the bus to avoid your tariff wrath?”

In fact, recent press reports from a wide range of sources indicate the the talks with Europe have produced virtually no progress. So the Donald let loose on Truth Social:

These outbursts are just more proof, of course, that Donald Trump has no idea whatsoever about what he is doing with his out-of-this-world TariffPalooza. He is just sliding by the seat of his ample britches, pursuing a simplistic protectionist theory of global trade he has held since the 1970s. Yet it is also one which entails shredding the Constitution with respect to the property rights of US importers and exporters alike—to say nothing of mocking the fundamentals of free market economics as taught by Milton Friedman, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard and numerous other sound economists—even the Keynesians, who tend to be mostly right on this issue.

Indeed, this latest outburst of 25% and 50% tariff threats against Apple and the EU, respectively, rests on no better predicate than the exchange depicted below.

Needless to say, the Donald’s underlying approach to global trade is that of a sharp-elbowed Bronx real estate developer. You take it as a given that property sellers, building contractors, government zoning officials, real estate lawyers etc. are all crooked thieves, meaning that you loose if they win. To avoid this unsatisfactory outcome you must therefore huff, bluff and threaten in order to set up a bargain where you get the better half of the pie.

In the case of global trade this Trumpian theory has a very simple application: Trade deficits mean that the other side is cheating and playing unfair via high tariffs, nontariff barriers and other interventions which tilt the playing field to the advantage of foreign competitors. The threat of hideously high US tariff rates, therefore, will cause them to concede their evil ways and strike a deal that promises to close the gap either by permanently higher tariffs on foreign goods or deep economic concessions from foreign governments.

Except. Except. The real world facts and empirical data do no support the Donald’s foreigners are “lying, cheating and stealing” theory at all. Of course, the world trade economy is not a perfect free market of Adam Smith’s design. There are distortions stemming from the statist policies of all countries—including the USA especially—-that deviate significantly from the norm of unhindered competition.

But those frictional variations are the result of statist policies pursued by all governments—capitalist, socialist and communist alike—that allegedly serve larger societal goals. For instance, central bank monetary stabilization, buy-national procurement standards, tax regimes that impact trade such as VATs, today’s world of sweeping health and environmental standards and, of course, traditional tariff barriers.

But here’s the thing. When it comes these free market deviations the US is as big a miscreant as almost every other major trading nation or block. In fact, the biggest distortion of free trade stems from central bank manipulation of financial asset prices, inflation rates and capital and money flows—a venue in which the Fed is the reigning champion.

Even on other NTBs (nontariff barriers) the US is not so simon pure. More than $800 billion of “buy America” requirements on Federal, state and local procurement towers far above similar NTBs among our trading partners. Likewise, the number one source of trade-distorting industrial subsidies in the world is the Pentagon by a long shot.

And when it comes to traditional tariff barriers, the truth is that’s a long gone issue of yesteryear. Since the early 1990s various rounds of both multi-lateral and bilateral trade deals have caused the weighted average tariff on merchandise goods traded on world markets to drop from around 9% to barely 2.0% at present. That’s nearly an 80% drop, and self-evidently an average 2% levy on imports is not evidence of market-distorting trade barriers in any way, shape or form.

And, no, the US has not been “stupid” on the negotiated tariff-reduction front by lowering its tariffs by far more than other countries, as the Donald falsely contends. Yet to resolve all doubt, we asked GROK 3 to undertake the laborious task of computing the weighted average tariff on the top 30 categories of traded goods between the US and the EU, and to then compare these respective tariff rates to the trade surplus or deficit on each product group.

Needless to say, tariff barriers have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that in the most recent complete year (2023) the US imported $553 billion of goods from the EU-27, while exporting only $317 billion to these same trading partners. Accordingly, the yawning $236 billion US trade deficit with Europe amounted to 27% of total turnover of $870 billion.

Proof of the pudding that tariff barriers are irrelevant to this outcome and therefore are in no need of the Donald’s self-proclaimed “art of the deal” skills are these two bottom lines numbers. To wit, the US imposed a weighted average tariff of 2.06% on its imports from Europe, while the latter levied a 2.88% average duty on its imports from the USA.

In short, folks, there is not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place that a tiny 82 basis point difference in average tariffs accounted for anything, let alone the massive, quarter-trillion dollar US trade imbalance with Europe. These data are just a flat-out, screaming “no dice” answer to the Donald’s claim that the EU is a trade cheat on the fundamental matter of import duties.

Moreover, when you look at the individual categories, the story is even more unequivocal. For instance, the US had a $40 billion trade deficit with the EU on nonelectrical machinery alone, which amounted to nearly 29% of total turnover on this commodity group. But the EU tariff on nonelectrical machinery is just 1.00% versus the slightly higher US tariff of 2.25%. Again, our tariff is bigger than theirs, but both are so small as to amount to hardly detectable friction in this trading category.

Likewise, in the case of pharmaceuticals, the US had a $20 billion bilateral deficit with the EU, but in this case the tariffs are 0.0% on both sides. Similarly, in the case of aircraft the US tariff is 1.0% and the EU tariff is 1.5%. As it happened, the US had a small deficit of $4 billion or just 12.5% of turnover with the EU in the aircraft and parts category. Yet no reasonable person would think that this 50 basis points of difference on tariffs had anything to do with the outcome of the on-going battle for business between Boeing and Airbus on both sides of the Atlantic pond.

In the case of petroleum, refined products, natural gas and other mineral fuels, the small US deficit of $5 billion on $55 billion of two-way trade with the EU was not owing to onerous tariffs on the EU side, either. In fact, the EU tariff of 1.o% on trade in this product group was slightly lower than the US rate of 1.5%.

To take two more examples, the bilateral US trade deficit with Europe in optical instruments and organic chemicals is -$5 billion in each case. But in optical instruments the US average tariff of 2.5% is slightly higher than the 2.0% rate for the EU. Contrariwise, the tariff rates for organic chemicals are 2.0% on US imports from the EU versus 2.5% on European imports of organic chemicals from the US. And in both cases, of course, the fractional differences in tariffs surely have virtually nothing to do with the identical trade deficits incurred by the US.

Even in the Donald’s favorite hobby horse—automotive trade—it is not clear that the significant differences in tariff rates is the major explanatory cause of the $40 billion US deficit in that category.

The US tariff is 2.5% on passenger cars but 25% on trucks. So Europe-based global auto companies don’t ship any pickups or material numbers of SUV’s (save for Range Rovers) to the US but not because of the US tariff is a high 25%. The real reason for low volumes from Europe is that they simple don’t make many of these US style “light trucks” in their high fuel tax driven passenger car factories in Europe.

By contrast, they do send large volumes of highly engineered upper-end Mercedes, BMWs, Volkswagen’s and Porsche’s to the USA. But they sell millions of these per year here not because of the low US 2.5% tariff on passenger cars but because these European brands have taken the traditional luxury market from Cadillac and Lincoln via better products and better marketing.

At the same time, US auto producers excel in mass market pick-ups and SUVs, which account for 80% of production in US assembly plants. But the EU’s 10% tariff on autos is not the main reason US auto OEMs do not ship these products to Europe. The real reason is that there is scant demand for these US style “light truck” vehicles in Europe due, again, to high fuel taxes.

Besides, the auto trade deficit of $40 billion accounts for just 17% of the $236 billion US trade deficit with Europe. In volume terms, the bilateral auto trade with Europe of $100 billion amounts to just 11% of the $870 billion total two-way trade with the EU.

In short, tariffs did not have a damn thing to do with the huge trade imbalance with the EU that had the Donald on the warpath again on Friday morning. In Part 2, therefore, we will address and amplify on the real causes of the imbalance with the EU, China and the balance of the world.

The spoiler alert, of course, is that the underlying cause of the US trillion dollar annual trade deficit with the rest of the world has been manufactured not 10,000 miles away by untoward doings in Beijing, Tokyo and Brussels but a few blocks from the White House in the Eccles Building—-home of America’s rogue central bank.

Owing to the Fed’s wrong-headed pro-inflation bias, unit labor costs in the US manufacturing sector have risen by 53% just since the recovery began in 2010. In a word, America’s industrial economy, trade balance and good paying jobs were not stolen by foreigners; they were driven abroad by the the inflationary excesses of the Washington politicians and policy apparatchiks.

Index of US Manufacturing Unit Labor Costs Since 2010

Table 1: 2023 US Imports from EU-27 ($ in billions)

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post More Trumpian Tariff Hallucinosis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

GBH News

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Thanks, David Martin.

Ungrounded

Photographs Expose Thomas Merton Murder Cover-up – CovertAction Magazine

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Follow Robert Barnes at:

https://sportspicks.locals.com/

https://vivabarneslaw.locals.com/

https://1776lawcenter.com

The post The Duran – Populism and the Deep State w/Robert Barnes appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/il-ruolo-della-cina-nella-crisi-fentanyl)

Le tensioni tra gli Stati Uniti e la Cina sono aumentate, con i due Paesi che hanno aumentato i dazi sulle rispettive importazioni. Nel frattempo la retorica di Pechino è diventata sempre più conflittuale.

All'inizio di marzo l'ambasciata cinese a Washington ha condiviso sui social media un post del suo Ministero degli esteri, in cui ribadiva: “Se gli Stati Uniti vogliono la guerra, che sia una guerra tariffaria, commerciale o di qualsiasi altro tipo, siamo pronti a combattere fino alla fine”.

Il presidente Donald Trump ha avvertito che, sebbene gli Stati Uniti non vogliano dichiarare guerra alla Cina, sono “ben equipaggiati per gestirla”.

Trump ha imposto un ulteriore dazio del 20% su tutti i beni fabbricati in Cina, citando l'emergenza nazionale sul continuo traffico di fentanyl negli Stati Uniti, un oppioide mortale da 50 a 100 volte più potente della morfina.

Ancora oggi la Cina rimane la principale fonte di precursori del fentanyl, i quali vengono spediti in Messico, dove vengono trasformati in questa droga. Poi viene introdotta illegalmente negli Stati Uniti, principalmente attraverso il confine meridionale.

In risposta all'ulteriore dazio di Trump, Pechino ha imposto un dazio aggiuntivo del 15% sul carbone e sul gas naturale degli Stati Uniti e un ulteriore 10% sulle attrezzature agricole e sui pick-up.

Il regime comunista ha anche definito l'epidemia di fentanyl un “problema interno” degli Stati Uniti e ha bollato i dazi statunitensi come un “ricatto”.

Yuan Hongbing, ex-professore di legge all'Università di Pechino in Cina, ora residente in Australia, ha affermato che l'epidemia di oppioidi negli Stati Uniti è ben lungi dall'essere la ferita autoinflitta che il PCC ha lasciato intendere.

Il regime cinese ha avuto un ruolo significativo nella crisi del fentanyl in America e incolpare gli Stati Uniti per questo è da tempo la strategia del leader del Partito Comunista Cinese (PCC), Xi Jinping, ha detto lo stesso Yuan a NTD, organo di stampa gemello di Epoch Times, in una recente puntata del programma in lingua cinese “Pinnacle View”.

Yuan, che ha accesso privilegiato ai vertici del PCC, ha affermato che Xi ha costantemente impartito direttive interne durante il primo e il secondo mandato di Trump, secondo cui Pechino deve continuare a sostenere che la crisi della droga in Europa e negli Stati Uniti non è collegata alla Cina.

Yuan ha affermato che il regime ha anche ricevuto da Xi l'ordine di affermare che la Cina produce legalmente i precursori chimici e che se questi vengono trasformati in farmaci mortali e introdotti di contrabbando negli Stati Uniti o in Europa, la responsabilità non ricade sulla Cina.

L'esperto cinese ha inoltre affermato che il fentanyl è al centro del tentativo di Xi di “vendicarsi” dell'Occidente. Ha detto che Xi incolpa quest'ultimo di aver sottoposto la Cina a un secolo di umiliazioni a seguito delle Guerre dell'oppio a metà del XIX secolo. Durante quel periodo la Cina doveva firmare una serie di trattati ingiusti che prevedevano la cessione dei territori cinesi e apriva i porti cinesi al controllo straniero.

“È proprio grazie alle direttive di Xi che stiamo assistendo a un aumento sia della produzione di precursori del fentanyl in Cina sia alla loro esportazione, alimentando l'attuale crisi negli Stati Uniti”, ha affermato Yuan.

I decessi per overdose da fentanyl sono diventati una crisi nazionale, con oltre 200 vittime americane al giorno, secondo la Drug Enforcement Administration. Solo nel 2023 circa 75.000 americani sono morti per overdose da fentanyl, un aumento impressionante di 23 volte rispetto a 10 anni fa.

Oggi le overdose accidentali da farmaci sono la principale causa di morte tra gli americani di età compresa tra i 18 e i 45 anni. Un dato più positivo è che il numero di decessi per overdose correlati agli oppioidi è diminuito di oltre il 20% nel 2024, secondo i Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

La crisi fentanyl è diventata una delle principali preoccupazioni degli elettori americani ed è diventata una delle forze trainanti delle relazioni tra Stati Uniti e Cina, ha affermato l'esperto cinese Alexander Liao.

Quest'ultimo ha affermato che le relazioni tra Pechino e Washington sono cambiate radicalmente. Durante l'amministrazione Biden i due Paesi hanno attraversato una “glaciazione” diplomatica, durante la quale le comunicazioni tra alti funzionari si sono bloccate per circa 10 mesi nel 2022 e nel 2023. Tuttavia Liao ritiene che il confronto abbia ora raggiunto un nuovo livello.

“Che si tratti di commercio o di altri aspetti, gli Stati Uniti e la Cina si sono rivoltati l'uno contro l'altro”, ha detto Liao a Epoch Times.

“Poco rumore ma fatti feroci” è il modo in cui definisce la situazione attuale tra Pechino e Washington, in contrasto con le “grandi discussioni e pochi fatti” in corso tra Stati Uniti ed Europa.

“La politica funziona diversamente tra nemici e amici”, ha aggiunto.

Gli Stati Uniti sono il nemico perfetto per il regime cinese

Nell'ultimo decennio la Cina ha fatto registrare una crescita economica significativa. Secondo i dati della Banca Mondiale, il suo PIL nominale è ora superiore a tre quarti di quello degli Stati Uniti. In termini di potere d'acquisto, l'economia cinese ha superato quella degli Stati Uniti nel 2016.

Qualche anno prima Xi aveva scalato i ranghi del PCC e nel 2013 ne aveva assunto la leadership.

Secondo Yuan, la natura comunista di Xi lo ha spinto a sfruttare immediatamente la forza economica della Cina per istituire un programma di politica estera, la Belt and Road Initiative, finalizzato a espandere il totalitarismo comunista in tutto il mondo.

Con il pretesto dello sviluppo infrastrutturale, la piattaforma geopolitica da $1.000 miliardi si appropria delle risorse naturali di altri Paesi, tra cui minerali essenziali per la produzione di chip per computer, ed espande l'uso dei loro porti per i propri scopi civili e militari.

Lo slogan politico distintivo di Xi è “realizzare il grande ringiovanimento della nazione cinese”.

La sua spinta verso il dominio cinese inizia con il declino del Paese 200 anni fa. Secondo il PCC, l'Occidente è responsabile della trasformazione della Cina da un vincitore a un perdente nel mondo. Il sistema educativo e la propaganda del regime comunista enfatizzano spesso le Guerre dell'oppio come l'inizio del “Secolo dell'umiliazione”.

Xi ha affermato che la riconquista di Hong Kong e Macao, rispettivamente dal Regno Unito e dal Portogallo, ha “cancellato l'umiliazione di un secolo” e che il passo successivo è l'unificazione di Taiwan con la Cina continentale.

Nonostante l'apparente promozione del nazionalismo, ha affermato Liao, la logica di Xi rimane radicata nella dottrina comunista nel perseguire la diffusione globale del comunismo – o, nel gergo del Partito, “alzare la bandiera rossa in tutto il mondo”.

Questo rende gli Stati Uniti il ​​nemico numero uno del PCC, ha aggiunto Liao. In qualità di protettori di Taiwan e leader dell'attuale ordine mondiale, gli Stati Uniti rappresentano il principale ostacolo ai piani di Xi.

Il PCC ha sfruttato decenni di rapida crescita economica della Cina per giustificare il proprio dominio. Tuttavia le draconiane misure di lockdown imposte da Xi per il COVID-19 hanno esacerbato i problemi di lunga data della sua economia alimentata dal debito e guidata dall'offerta. Dopo la revoca dei lockdown, il crollo del mercato immobiliare e la carenza di liquidità delle amministrazioni locali hanno lasciato l'economia in stagnazione.

Istigare il risentimento contro un nemico esterno è un'altra tattica utilizzata dal PCC per rafforzare il proprio potere. Gli Stati Uniti diventano quindi il bersaglio perfetto e il Partito può propagandare i propri sforzi per contrastarlo.

L'obiettivo finale di Xi

L'obiettivo finale di Xi, ha affermato Yuan, è “sostituire gli Stati Uniti nel ruolo di garante dell'ordine mondiale”. Yuan ha aggiunto che lui e Xi erano soliti bere insieme quando quest'ultimo era ancora una figura di potere a livello provinciale. Un anno dopo l'insediamento di Xi in Cina, il bilancio delle vittime per overdose di fentanyl negli Stati Uniti è aumentato vertiginosamente. Nel 2017 i decessi annuali hanno raggiunto quota 28.000; nel 2023 il numero è balzato a 75.000.

Nel 2017, quando Pechino sapeva che la Cina aveva superato gli Stati Uniti in termini di PIL misurato in termini di potere d'acquisto, Xi e i suoi seguaci credevano che il “problema americano” sarebbe stato risolto entro un decennio – con la sostituzione degli Stati Uniti da parte della Cina come superpotenza mondiale.

Liao ha affermato che le sue fonti interne a Pechino gli hanno riferito di un clima di ottimismo crescente all'interno del PCC, il quale ha portato a un atteggiamento sprezzante nei confronti degli Stati Uniti tra i leader del partito.

“In quel clima, i sostenitori della linea dura all'interno del PCC si sono sostanzialmente immessi su un percorso irreversibile di scontro con gli Stati Uniti”, ha affermato Liao.

Il fallimento degli Stati Uniti nel contenere l'epidemia di droga ha anche rafforzato l'orgoglio e la fiducia di Xi, ha affermato Yuan, aggiungendo che Xi vede la crisi fentanyl negli Stati Uniti come la prova che “l'Oriente sta crescendo, l'Occidente sta declinando”.

Secondo le fonti di Liao, durante la prima visita di stato di Trump in Cina nel novembre 2017, un alto funzionario del PCC disse a Trump: “Deve solo fornirci materie prime e un mercato di consumo per la nostra produzione”.

Una fonte interna a Pechino ha riferito a Liao che quell'incontro spinse Trump ad applicare dazi sulla Cina non appena tornato a Washington. La fonte ha affermato che l'arroganza e il tono condiscendente del funzionario cinese avevano messo Trump profondamente a disagio, in quanto la dipendenza degli Stati Uniti dalla produzione manifatturiera cinese stava sfuggendo di mano.

Epoch Times ha contattato la Casa Bianca per un commento.

Nel gennaio 2018 Trump ha iniziato a imporre dazi sulle importazioni cinesi per ridurre lo squilibrio commerciale e costringere la Cina a interrompere il furto di segreti commerciali e proprietà intellettuale statunitensi.

Due anni dopo Pechino e Washington firmarono un accordo commerciale in base al quale la Cina si impegnava ad acquistare più prodotti statunitensi.

Due mesi dopo sarebbe scoppiata la “pandemia”.

Il primo giorno del suo secondo mandato, Trump ha ordinato un'indagine sulla politica commerciale da condurre entro il 1° aprile. Lo studio individuava la Cina come bersaglio per la valutazione dell'adempimento dell'accordo commerciale e per l'esame di eventuali pratiche commerciali ingiuste o sbilanciate.

Trump ha definito il 2 aprile il “Giorno della liberazione” degli Stati Uniti, giorno in cui ha imposto dazi reciproci per livellare il campo con tutti i suoi partner commerciali. Un risultato probabile è che la Casa Bianca imporrà dazi aggiuntivi sulle importazioni cinesi.

L'economia cinese è più debole rispetto al primo mandato di Trump e dipende maggiormente dalle esportazioni.

Il senatore Steve Daines (R-Mont.), il primo politico statunitense a visitare Pechino durante il secondo mandato di Trump, ha trasmesso il messaggio del presidente agli alti dirigenti cinesi, richiedendo “azioni decisive da parte della Cina per fermare il flusso di precursori del fentanyl”. Il 23 marzo ha ribadito la richiesta degli Stati Uniti in un'intervista a Bloomberg.

“Sarà difficile discutere di dazi e barriere non tariffarie finché la questione dei precursori del fentanyl non sarà risolta”, ha affermato.

Indipendentemente dalle concessioni che Pechino proporrà a Trump in un possibile vertice Trump-Xi a giugno, i due Paesi sono su una rotta di collisione “inevitabile”, ha affermato Yuan.

“Non si tratta di un conflitto temporaneo innescato da un singolo evento, che si tratti di dazi o di altre questioni specifiche”, ha aggiunto, “il confronto è critico e inevitabile, guidato da forze più ampie e di lungo periodo”.

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

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Critics of the free market often claim that capitalism is a system of ruthless struggle for survival. They say it is a system of dog-eat-dog competition. In fact, as the great Ludwig von Mises argued in an unanswerable way, the free market replaces the struggle for survival found in the animal world with social cooperation in which everybody benefits. Capitalism is a system of peace, not war.

The key point that Mises makes is that human beings benefit from the division of labor and the division of labor means peaceful exchange, not war. As he says in Human Action, “The theory of evolution as expounded by Darwin, says a school of social Darwinism, has clearly demonstrated that in nature there are no such things as peace and respect for the lives and welfare of others. In nature there is always struggle and merciless annihilation of the weak who do not succeed in defending themselves. Liberalism’s plans for eternal peace-both in domestic and in foreign relations-are the outcome of an illusory rationalism contrary to the natural order. However, the notion of the struggle for existence as Darwin borrowed it from Malthus and applied it in his theory, is to be understood in a metaphorical sense. Its meaning is that a living being actively resists the forces detrimental to its own life. This resistance, if it is to succeed, must be appropriate to the environmental conditions in which the being concerned has to hold its own. It need not always be a war of extermination such as in the relations between men and morbific microbes. Reason has demonstrated that, for man, the most adequate means of improving his condition is social cooperation and division of labor. They are man’s foremost tool in his struggle for survival. But they can work only where there is peace. Wars, civil wars, and revolutions are detrimental to man’s success in the struggle for existence because they disintegrate the apparatus of social cooperation.”

According to Mises, there is a harmony of interest among people. People are unequal—that is a clear fact that the incessant propaganda of socialists and “anti-racists” cannot gainsay. But even the “inferiors” benefit from peaceful exchange. As Mises says in Theory and History: “Yet man’s almost universal acknowledgment of the principle of social cooperation did not result in agreement regarding all interhuman relations. While almost all men agree in looking upon social cooperation as the foremost means for realizing all human ends, whatever they may be, they disagree as to the extent to which peaceful social cooperation is a suitable means for attaining their ends and how far it should be resorted to. Those whom we may call the harmonists base their argument on Ricardo’s law of association and on Malthus’ principle of population. They do not, as some of their critics believe, assume that all men are biologically equal. They take fully into account the fact that there are innate biological differences among various groups of men as well as among individuals belonging to the same group. Ricardo’s law has shown that cooperation under the principle of the division of labor is favorable to all participants. It is an advantage for every man to cooperate with other men, even if these others are in every respect—mental and bodily capacities and skills, diligence and moral worth—inferior.”

When Mises mentions “Ricardo’s law,” he has in mind the economist David Ricardo’s law of comparative cost. Mises brilliantly extended Ricardo’s law into a general Law of Association. As he explains in Human Action: “It is advantageous for the better endowed area to concentrate its efforts upon the production of those commodities for which its superiority is greater, and to leave to the less endowed area the production of other goods in which its own superiority is less. The paradox that it is more advantageous to leave more favorable domestic conditions of production unused and to procure the commodities they could produce from areas in which conditions for their production are less favorable, is the outcome of the immobility of labor and capital, to which the more favorable places of production are inaccessible. Ricardo was fully aware of the fact that his law of comparative cost, which he expounded mainly in order to deal with a special problem of international trade, is a particular instance of the more universal law of association.”

The benefits of social cooperation extend internationally. We benefit from free trade with other nations. But in order to have free trade, we need peace. As Mises says, “There are high-minded men who detest war because it brings death and suffering.  However much one may admire their humanitarianism, their argument against war, in being based on philanthropic grounds, seems to lose much or all of its force when we consider the statements of the supporters and proponents of war.  The latter by no means deny that war brings with it pain and sorrow.  Nevertheless, they believe it is through war and war alone that mankind is able to make progress.  War is the father of all things, said a Greek philosopher, and thousands have repeated it after him.  Man degenerates in time of peace.  Only war awakens in him slumbering talents and powers and imbues him with sublime ideals.  If war were to be abolished, mankind would decay into indolence and stagnation. It is difficult or even impossible to refute this line of reasoning on the part of the advocates of war if the only objection to war that one can think of is that it demands sacrifices.  For the proponents of war are of the opinion that these sacrifices are not made in vain and that they are well worth making.  If it were really true that war is the father of all things, then the human sacrifices it requires would be necessary to further the general welfare and the progress of humanity.  One might lament the sacrifices, one might even strive to reduce their number, but one would not be warranted in wanting to abolish war and to bring about eternal peace.   The liberal critique of the argument in favor of war is fundamentally different. from that of the humanitarians.  It starts from the premise that not war, but peace, is the father of all things.  What alone enables mankind to advance and distinguishes man from the animals is social cooperation.  It is labor alone that is productive: it creates wealth and therewith lays the outward foundations for the inward flowering of man.  War only destroys; it cannot create.  War, carnage, destruction, and devastation we have in common with the predatory beasts of the jungle; constructive labor is our distinctively human characteristic.  The liberal abhors war, not, like the humanitarian, in spite of the fact that it has beneficial consequences, but because it has only harmful ones.”

Let’s do everything we can to promote social cooperation and peace through the free market!

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Although Memorial Day in the United Sates is ostensibly a day for honoring soldiers killed in wars, it is, rather, a day for promoting war. If it were to honor the dead, all its pageantry would be in opposition to war. Rather than being haunted by the ghosts of war, many Americans are very proud of all its soldiers killed while killing foreigners for the military industrial complex and the super-rich who own the country.

For the U.S.A. is a warfare state; it has been waging imperialistic overseas wars for a long, long time, and using its soldiers as cannon fodder. Most families of dead soldiers find it impossible to admit that their loved ones died in vain, even if courageously.

Without waging wars, the U.S. economy, as presently constituted, would collapse. Business goes on as usual.

Remembering all the war dead is like drifting on a ghost ship in a still sea of burning water. Haunted by the eerie silence of their absent presence, if we listen closely enough, we can hear such victims calling to us: Remember me, Remember me, why did it have to be?

“All warfare is ghostly,” writes the classical scholar Norman O. Brown, “every army an exercitus feralis (a funereal exercise), every soldier a living corpse.”

The world is littered with the corpses of wars’ victims, those of the killers and the killed, soldiers of every nation – but the vast majority are innocent civilians who never picked up a gun. The earth is so saturated with all their blood that one would expect the rivers to run red as a reminder. But that only happens in poems, as with Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood.”

But what do poets know that the potentates, politicians, and mad generals don’t? These killers are experts at shedding innocent blood to satisfy their blood lust and then erecting monuments to the killers. They are necrophiliacs, while all the poets do is to remind us that we will all die and that we should affirm life and love each other before we do – that war is an evil lie, as Wilfred Owen told us about World War I in Dulce et Decorum Est:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

But that was long ago. War’s victims still fall everywhere, every day they are stilled in deserts, mountains, jungles, cities, houses, hospitals, schools, on the open roads, in bedrooms, in woods, in alleyways, crouched  in basements, killed from the sky, the ground, directly, remotely, by their own desperate hands, slowly in despair. Why count the ways, why count the victims – the truth is countless?

But we must count, not to wave a flag and march down Main Steet to the sound of a marching band behind a fire engine with little kids on bikes and old men with rifles on their shoulders, but to galvanize ourselves to stand and oppose the warmongers who run the government.

Who can not weep and scream in opposition as the U.S./Israel commits genocide against the Palestinians? Savage slaughter for all to see but ignore.

Who is so blind as not to see the wars waged from administration to administration as smoothly as the change of seasons?

Once the warmongers shot down the U.S.’s great antiwar leaders. Now they suck the population in with Memorial Day sales and dreams of cookouts.

But business goes on as usual, as the great Roberta Flack sang so mournfully, “except that my brother is dead.” George M. Cohan was right: “The Yanks are coming.” They are always coming, but he was wrong to think it is ever over. It’s not supposed to be ever over.

And “over there,” Maha Khalil, a one year old Iraqi girl, was killed in the first few months of America’s criminal war against Iraq.

Mrs. Ngugen Thi Tau was slaughtered by U. S. soldiers at My Lai, Vietnam.

Mohammed Nidal Hisham Attallah, Ahmad Shadi Talal Al-Haddad, and Masa Mohammed Youssef Nasr are a few of at least 16,500 Palestinian children killed by Israel/U.S. in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

Who knows all the dead in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Libya, East Timor, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, Chile, throughout Africa, and all the other countries where the American military and the CIA have been dispatched? Who can grasp it? Their names mean nothing to those who didn’t know them, just as the endless names of the U.S. military dead (most drafted into a war they didn’t want or understand) that line the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are a sad blur to those who come to look but didn’t know the fallen. The same is even truer for anyone who views the Holocaust memorial in Boston where all one sees are rows and rows of concentration camp numbers; for every number a real person, each one reduced by the Nazis to six-digits tattooed on arms.

When we try to name and count wars’ victims, we are overwhelmed and stunned. Yet the wars persist. Like the pawns conscripted to fight them, the anonymous ghosts of all the victims murmur in our ears: Why?

Dylan sings:

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And the land that I live in
Has God on its side.

But not all of the wars’ victim’s die. Vast numbers become “living corpses,” also mostly anonymous and forsaken. Across the world and here at home wherever the American war machine has set its sights, the lame and crippled struggle on, victims of bombs and bullets, napalm and white phosphorous, nuclear radiation, torture, biological weapons – all the grotesque weapons the ghouls of the weapons’ industries have conjured up from hell for their paymasters. Countless living victims, yes, but the weapons industries carefully count their bloody profits, as do those who invest in these companies while turning a blind eye to their own complicity.

Many of the wounds of war are psychological and spiritual. And so many of the victims suffer silently. Wars’ terrors follow them everywhere down their nights and down their days, and they can often find no escape from the nightmare images that populate their minds, flashing in and out. It’s beyond imagining the living hell of children worldwide reliving the sight of the bloodied mangled bodies of their parents at their feet, victims of bombs or death squads or perhaps “collateral damage,” as if any words or reasons could undue their everlasting trauma or cover up the radical evil of those who killed them

We owe it the wounded, dead, and tormented war victims everywhere to memorialize them with the words:

War is a lie, and only truth will free us.

And to stop marching with the drums drumming and the flags flying as if we are proud of the U.S. killing machine.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Memorial Day: It’s Not About the Dead Soldiers but About Glorifying War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Larger military facilities resembled small towns. They had chapels, PXs, barbershops, service clubs and even fast food restaurants. Camp H had a pizzeria run by a Korean gentleman that I will call Kim.

We noticed a spike in gastroenteritis cases in the tsunami of clap and tracked the outbreak to Kim’s pizzeria. A superficial walk-through of the kitchen revealed gross violations of ordinary health codes. The place was unscreened and full of flies. There were filthy dishes everywhere and the garbage can was open inside the building. There was no provision for handwashing for the cooks and no one knew where the restroom was located. I, and two other physicians went to Post’s commanding officer to ask him to shut that cesspool down. The Sgt. “chief of staff” refused to allow us to talk to the Colonel, no matter our rank or health implications. Our Medical Service Corps Officer (who may have been in the know) told us to try again the next day. By the next morning, our inspection revealed Kim’s pizzeria as a model of modern culinary sanitation. Copper pipes had been installed to deliver hot and cold water, the cooks and servers wore hairnets. There was a new refrigerator in the corner.

What?

We soon found the answer; it seemed that Kim had a nifty financial arrangement with the sergeants.  He operated pizzerias on three large American posts, and these were at first blush, his main businesses. He also owned a brothel in the Cholon district of Saigon which was the clean, prosperous and militarily secure Chinese colony. He had enrolled all of the sergeants on the three posts in a scheme for them to refer enlisted men to spend their three-day in country R and R at his whorehouse and charge each of them $150. He would in turn kick back $75 (the dollar was strong in those days) to the referring Sergeant. Booze, women and rooms were free to the grunt. The sergeants easily arranged flights down to Saigon on military aircraft at no cost to the soldier. The sergeants had every incentive to keep Kim’s pizzeria in business. They had worked all the previous day and most of the night to bring the pizzeria up to code. (I had involuntarily contributed to this folly. One of the sergeants in my medical detachment had been permanently posted to Kim’s whorehouse. He made sure that the young ladies were free of contagious diseases.  He also enforced civility on enlisted men released from usual company discipline while on leave.)

We physicians settled back into our usual narcotized existence, but our lethargy was destined to deepen. Every evening, six to eight personal pizzas of various kinds appeared at the back door of the clinic, “Special for the doctors.” We slipped into caloric comas.  Kim bought our souls with cheap carbohydrates and fat.We acquiesced to Kim’s chicanery. The sergeants were too powerful for us to shield the grunts from crass commercial exploitation by their enlisted overseers. The issue as we then understood it languished for about three months.

It was the  JAG officers, self-termed legal beagles, who finally outed Kim.

An explanation of the economic and financial system in Vietnam is necessary at this point. The currency circulating among the Vietnamese was the Dong. It was also referred to by the name used under the French of Piaster or “P.”The piaster was virtually worthless in world markets and served only for minor purchases among the Vietnamese themselves.

At the opposite extreme of the financial hierarchy was the US dollar, the storehouse of wealth and standard of exchange. The US Armed Forces did not want the purchasing power of the US dollar or greenbacks to be acquired by our enemies in North Vietnam or by the Vietcong.. We were forbidden under severe penalty from importing or having American money while in country.

In order for Americans to pay for junk at the Px, haircuts, fund bank accounts and the like, the Armed Forces issued an artificial currency called the Military Pay Currency, termed “MPC.” Banks on the larger posts enabled us to send MPC, converted to US currency, back to the “world” to pay bills or to invest. On leaving Vietnam, we could convert our MPC into greenback. There was an officially sanctioned program for us to exchange MPCs for P so that we could do business with the Vietnamese. My recollection was that the official rate was sixty P for one MPC, but that the black market rate was around 300 to one. Any Vietnamese who did substantial business with Americans in brothels, restaurants, and jitneys accepted MPCs freely. MPC was worth substantially less than the greenback, but it served as the backbone of the financial system for the Armed Forces. (I still don’t understand why my checks denominated in Greenback would not have been usable by the VC.)

To return to Kim’s commercial dealings on three large American bases.  He required several kinds of licenses from the American military. He had to have franchises to operate his three pizzerias. There was a separate authorization to export his profits and to pay for importing the raw materials like large quantities of cheese, pepperoni, sausages, flour and the like that were not available in Vietnam for making his pizzas. He also had to pay his workers in P so he needed authorization to convert large quantities of MPC in and out of the local currency.

Kim’s main business was that of a currency manipulator. He took the MPC that he claimed as revenue from his pizzerias (plus the brothel in Saigon) and converted them into greenback-cash in Hong Kong. He smuggled some of this greenback back into Vietnam and exchanged it for virtually worthless Ps in the local Vietnamese currency markets. He could turn this P into MPCs in the black markets. The MPCs were then run through his three businesses to repeat the cycle. In order to increase his cash flow, he padded the sales figures in his pizzerias so that it appeared (at least at  Camp H) that every one of the 2,500 men on that large base bought one pizza at a dollar per every day for over a year. The legal beagles estimated that he had been able to clear over three-million dollars in this scheme. Kims pizzerias and his hotel in Saigon were mere fronts for his currency operation. He funneled enormous amounts of money to our enemies, corrupted our sergeants and physicians, and caused several dozen soldiers to be sickened with diarrhea.

But in his favor, Korea was untroubled by his knavery for a few years  And he did a lot more than I did to prevent venereal diseases among the enlisted men.

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It has been another exciting week in a world at war where the word “diplomacy” has no meaning and would probably be defined by America’s head of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as a doctrine in which you shoot someone first before he or she can shoot you. In my article last week I discussed the reports that there has been a serious rift between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, exemplified by Trump’s unwillingness to talk to the Israeli leader followed by his failure to visit Israel on his recent Middle East trip. Sources attributed the break to Trump’s perception that he was being “manipulated” by the Israeli, which was completely plausible though something that should have been recognized and warned against by Trump’s foreign policy advisers when he first ascended to the presidency in 2017. Israel always manipulates opinion on the United States through its lobby’s control of the media and corruption of the politicians.

I opined that the reports of the disenchantment with “America’s best friend” were credible possibly linked to spying involving National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, though I also observed that many of my contacts were skeptical, warning that the whole thing might be a set-up possibly engineered by Trump’s Zionist roving negotiator Steve Witkoff and specifically designed to benefit Israel. That means that the US was feigning a “breakup” with Netanyahu to enable it to reach an agreement with all the leading Arab countries of the Middle East in order to confirm Israel’s security while Netanyahu is completely wiping the Palestinians off the face of the earth. Trump has in fact said that his policies and the Mideast trip were “very good for Israel.”

In a follow up to my article I advised during an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano that it pays to be skeptical as Trump has done absolutely nothing to change Israel’s behavior, quite the contrary, even though he had an opportunity to support Palestinian statehood in the context of UN membership and also to demand an end to the genocide taking place in Gaza. The truth behind whether there was in fact a serious rupture in the personal relationship of the two leaders should be measured in light of the presence or absence of consequences when Israel pursues policies damaging to US interests.

Indeed, Netanyahu has personally confirmed that all is well with the United States. He said at a press conference last Wednesday that President Trump had assured him that the US and his administration were completely committed to Israel despite the series of media reports that have said there’s a problem between the two leaders. “Let me give you some details that perhaps haven’t been made public. A few days ago — I think around 10 days ago, maybe a little more — I spoke on the phone with President Trump. And he said to me, literally: ‘Bibi, I want you to know — I have absolute commitment to you. I have absolute commitment to the State of Israel.’”

Netanyahu also spoke with Vice President JD Vance, who, along with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, had also avoided a visit to Israel. “[Vance] said to me… ‘Listen, don’t pay attention to all these fake news spins about this rupture between us… He said: It’s all spin. This isn’t the truth, you know it’s not true, and I’m telling you, from our side, it’s not true.” Netanyahu also said that Israel wants to carry out “Trump’s plan” for Gaza to include the permanent removal of the Palestinian population to create a US managed seafront resort over the ruins of the strip. Per Netanyahu, the Israelis have now included the creation of “Trump Gaza” as one of the redline conditions to permit an end of the war against Hamas.

The Israeli and Middle Eastern media have been reporting extensively and critically on the genocide and the various players involved in dealing with the Netanyahu agenda. A recent piece discussed the 29 mostly European Union (EU) countries led by the UK, France and Canada that have now called on Israel to moderate its behavior or face both sanctions and a suspension of the EU Israel trade arrangements, which greatly benefit the Jewish state. The EU declared that Israel’s announcement of letting some aid in was “wholly inadequate. If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response” the leaders’ statement said. Netanyahu responded to the threat by declaring absurdly that “You’re on the wrong side of humanity and you’re on the wrong side of history.” But as the saying goes, unfortunately, talk is cheap, either from Netanyahu or from Israel’s newly minted critics. Diplomatic announcements and threatened sanctions mean always dancing around the awful truth. Israel is committing some of the worst war crimes humanity has ever witnessed and the Europeans and the Americans give every impression that they will certainly back off, deferring to Israel and persisting in doing absolutely nothing that will bring the suffering to an end.

The European gesture in particular is an attempt to make up somewhat for its support for 19 months of genocide. The completely contemptible Prime Minister of the UK Keir Starmer, confronted by a British public that has swung strongly anti-Israeli, has made a big show about taking action against Israel and the Israelis cooperated with him by playing their part, expressing outrage over the temerity of anyone telling them how to deal with their neighbors. Indeed, there was some corroboration from informed Israeli sources that the threats and responses from the two sides were little more than a bit of Kabuki. A senior Israeli official even explained to the media why European leaders have bothered to shift positions after 19 months of silence about the murderous Gaza genocide, to instead feign instant outrage. It was all coordinated with Israel in advance. He said that “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels – and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.”

The current outrage is as orchestrated as was the earlier silence. Israel’s extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained why Israel would be maintaining a balancing act between outright killing all the Palestinian and keeping western support by allowing absolutely minimum food to enter Gaza: “We need our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God willing, until victory.” He also has said that his plan for the West Bank and Gaza includes giving the Palestinians the choice between subjugation, emigration, and death. Smotrich has repeatedly advocated for lethal force to be used against Palestinian children lest they grow up to be terrorists. On Wednesday the Israeli army doubled down on that message and to show how little it cares to coddle meddling foreigners when it fired on 31 European diplomats representing 29 countries who were visiting the Palestinian settlement Jenin on the West Bank in what was presumed to be in 100% Palestinian administered territory.

The fact is that no one in the European and American governments really cares about the Palestinians or their extermination. The only concern by the rulers is how their posturing looks to the rest of the world and to the voters in their own countries. Israel lies so enthusiastically in making its case and providing false evidence to back up its behavior that there is a tendency to be suspicious of anything it does. Last week’s assassination of two Israeli embassy staff members in Washington DC by a man who just happened to yell “Free Palestine!” was good news for the Jewish state in that it creates sympathy for a country that has featured as bad news for well over a year. It is already being whispered in intelligence circles that it was a “false flag” attack contrived by Mossad to create a favorable news cycle as Israel secretly cranks up for an imminent attack on Iran. Iran phobia features regularly in the Israeli media to include a recent Israeli claim that Iran is hiding its nuclear enrichment facilities, which is true but designed the keep the Israelis from blowing them up. The “favorable news cycle” has included Jewish Congressman Randy Fine of Florida calling for the use of nuclear weapons to destroy Gaza and kill its remaining inhabitants just like “Japan at the end of World War 2.”

And to make sure Iran gets to feel the sharp point of the sword, presidential emissary Witkoff has now declared that the nuclear monitoring arrangement being negotiated with Iran must include zero enrichment of uranium, something that was not on the table when the talks started, so they will go nowhere guaranteed. Per Witkoff “We cannot allow even one percent of an enrichment capability. Enrichment enables weaponization.” Where did that demand come from? From a secretly nuclear armed Israel by way of treasonous Israel Firster Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, no doubt. And if one follows that line of thinking, one can assume that Donald Trump is also on board, standing in line to pull out Netanyahu’s chair and bowing to him and then raising his mighty clenched fist before sending in the Yanks to finish the destruction of Persia. And if Iran responds effectively with force, Israel also has around 200 nukes that it will no doubt not hesitate to use as part of its “Samson Option” war plan. And Trump will undoubtedly say something like “Hey, what a big beautiful explosion! Nothing wrong with that! We used similar weapons to end the First World War!”

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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Never interrupt your enemy when he is committing serial suicide.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is committing serial suicide (in reverse American gore-style, when the serial killer always resurrects). In the case of the EU kakistocracy, serial self-destruction is always a given, and always skyrocketing.

So the EUrocrats in Brussels have just adopted their 17th round of sanctions against Russia – the sky is the limit – targeting nearly 200 tankers of the so-called Russian shadow fleet. The package, endorsed by EU member states, includes proverbial scores of asset freezes and visa bans.

The EU + UK combo is also scheming how to tighten the oil price cap on Russia to $50 a barrel, aiming to “hurt” Russia’s energy revenue.

Cue to a monster pipeline of laughter from the whole Global South, especially India and China. As if they would impeach any vessels of the shadow fleet, or if OPEC+ would care about a puny unilateral EUrocrat oil price cap.

To qualify EU actions as self-destructive anti-intellectualism is actually benign. The IQ of people at the top in Brussels is at dismembered worm level, exemplified by the Estonian batshit crazy chick in theory representing the foreign policy of 450 million EU citizens. Brussels has been reduced to a pathetic Estonian propaganda snake pit with a whiff of British accent.

The SVR has noted how there is a groundswell of despair in Brussels for the “mistake” of appointing the imbecile Estonian, universally known for “absolute incompetence” and a cringing “inability to build bridges” with EU leaders. She has already been removed from EU strategic defense policy planning.

Still, the sanctions package dementia will keep rollin’ on – redacted by careerists with fat salaries who only care about their own retirement gold package.

The next, the 18th, is supposed to be the largest sanctions package in History, according to the Brussels rumor mill, not only accusing Russia of multiples stances of Hybrid War and alleged use of chemical weapons (when it’s actually the neo-nazis of country 404 who resort to it) but targeting several Russian defense sector companies plus companies and intermediaries from third countries supplying sanctioned products to Russia.

Add to it the German BlackRock chancellor actively lobbying for an EU ban on the Nord Stream pipeline – blocking any possibility of a U.S.-Russia business cooperation, already signaled by Trump. This ban will be part of the 18th package.

Cue to Grandmaster Sergey Lavrov, who recently felt the need to emphasize that political EUro-trash banning the return of NordStream are “either sick or suicidal.”

Stealing Russia blind: good luck with that

On the Baltic front, there’s more, of course – in a “Pirates of the Baltics” register: that’s the SIGINT-heavy Baltic Sentry mission, which aims to block Russian maritime activity. France is on it – which implies a non-regional NATO member directly involved, unlike, for instance, Norway.

The Russians are unfazed. A strong possibility is that they will escort Russian ships with multi-functional naval and aerial drones fully equipped with reconnaissance and combat gear.

Yet on the Orwellian front, nothing beats the anti-Russian “tribunal” announced on May 9 by EU foreign ministers in Lviv, together with Kiev, to “hold top representatives of the Russian leadership accountable.” That involves 30 partner countries, incuding UK and Australia. The U.S. is out.

The scam was minutely deconstructed by Thomas Roper, who is now viciously demonized and censored by the EU, even though he is a journalist and EU citizen of German nationality. Yes, Brussels now sanctions its own citizens capable of critical thinking, to the point of freezing their assets and forbidding them to visit their home country. And this is just the beginning.

The new EU kangaroo “court” will be set up by the Council of Europe – and will issue judgments even in absentia, via 15 judges elected for 9 years each, the whole thing costing the EUrocracy around 1 billion euros.

Needless to add that this kangaroo “court” has absolutely no basis in international law, as it’s not approved by the UN; instead, it’s a private club of the fragmented West. Follow the money to understand the rationale.

Few people today remember that last year the European Commission (EU) gave a $50 billion loan to Kiev; actually $35 billion by the EU and $15 billion by the G7. The problem is only Brussels is responsible for repaying this joint EU-G7 loan. And the loan is supposed to be paid from the annual revenues generated by Russian assets frozen – i.e. stolen – in the EU, which Brussels refuses to release before the next 45 years.

These are all official EU decisions, enshrined in Regulation 2024/277. Translation: no, I repeat, no European mainstream media has informed taxpaying citizens across the union that the EU has formally decided to be at war with Russia for at least the next 45 years.

Brussels has done everything trying to steal for good the “confiscated” Russian assets. The problem is the EC EUrocrats have not found a mechanism to bypass international law.

Enter the “court”. The EUrocracy will force the kangaroo “tribunal” to blame Russia for everything related to the war and the SMO; sentence Russian government members to long-term prison sentences – in absentia; and then decide that Russia has to pay reparations. Endgame: the kangaroo “court” decides to steal for good the frozen Russian assets.

Once again: under international law, this is a robbery. Key inevitable consequence: no one across the Global South will trust the euro and European financial centers anymore.

This Russian demonization EUro-dementia scenario is in play just as Trump 2.0 still bets on some sort of normalization with Russia via a solution for Ukraine. Yet the key factor here is the cowardly collective fear of the EU kakistocracy: if they don’t rob Russia blind, they have no means to repay that fateful $50 billion loan to the Kiev goons.

That should be the main factor explaining why this collection of political mutts needs, badly, to non-stop escalate what is a de facto Forever War against Russia.

So expect only dementia coming from Brussels in the foreseeable future. Like the brilliant idea of setting up a single military bank to alocate loans for weapons production, a replica of the World Bank with a HQ in London. Since they could not find 120 billion euros to come up with a single European military fund – the German economy, for instance, continues to collapse – their plan B is this bank.

For all that cornucopia of sound and fury, Russia remains, once again, unfazed. Putin top aide and former National Security Adviser Nikolai “Yoda” Patrushev has noted how NATO has been “conducting exercises at our borders at a scale unseen in decades. … They are training for conducting a broad offensive from Vilnius to Odessa, seizing Kaliningrad region, imposing a naval blockade in the Baltic and the Black Seas and executing preventive strikes on the staging locations of Russian nuclear deterrence forces.”

Good luck with that. Good luck with the military bank. And good luck with stealing Russia blind with no blowback.

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

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When we last checked in on our dashing hero Donald Trump, he was enthusiastically salivating over the chance to sign the “Take it Down” internet censorship bill. A few days ago, he did indeed sign this very Orwellian legislation. Most of us don’t deal in “revenge porn,” whatever that is, but we have good reason to fear this odious act.

So that’s at least one thing Trump has accomplished thus far in his second go round; making it even more difficult for truly dissenting views to be accessed online. And this is also the only thing the Republican majority in the House and Senate- you know, the alternative to the hopelessly evil “Woke” Democrats- has managed to do. Well, I think they snuck yet another pay raise for themselves in there. It’s hard to tell, because they do that so regularly. Why no Republican-led legislation to deport millions of illegals? Or end birth right citizenship? Or approve of the DOGE efforts to expose (and presumably at some point eliminate) all that governmental waste, fraud, and abuse? It’s almost like the MAGA forces have no power in Congress. It’s almost like the RINOs still rule the Stupid Party. It’s almost like the entire MAGA movement is all smoke and no fire. Or as I call it, the Trumpenstein Project.

Other than the dangerous “Take it Down” act, try to find out exactly what Trump has and hasn’t actually accomplished. He wrote a lot of executive orders, many of them which sounded really good, but have any actually been implemented? Other than the pardoning of the January 6 political prisoners? I’ll give him credit for that, so Trumpenstein has done two things, one good and one bad. If official reports are to be believed, his “mass deportation” has resulted in fewer illegals leaving the country than there were under Joe Biden. Both sides have reason to lie about these numbers, as the Left wants to hysterically suggest Trump is deporting everyone named Jose, and the Right is trying to portray it as a genuine “mass deportation,” where Trump is keeping up with those “promises made, promises delivered.” I haven’t driven by my Home Depot at 7 in the morning lately, but my guess is the parking lot is as full as ever.

In true Trumpenstein fashion, he has resumed troll tweeting (well now it would be categorized as Truth Socializing) ridiculous celebrities, usually in the middle of the night. Well, I guess he has to do something when he’s not on the golf course. Bruce Springsteen, whose music helped comprise the soundtrack of my youth, has admittedly become a really pathetic caricature of “The Boss.” He fell recently walking towards the stage, and sometimes manages to look like he’s in the beginning stages of transitioning to perhaps become the “ Bossette.” Or to be Woody Allen’s stunt double. Anyway, he said some predictable nasty things about Trump, what you’d expect from your typical celebrity with TDS. And Trumpenstein lashed back, at 2:00 in the morning no less, with a flurry of name calling that would make any “Woke” partisan proud. He really utilized every grammar school epithet he could think of, calling Springsteen everything except “poo-poo head.”

Trump, in fact, demanded an investigation into this “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker” and others. In his patented all caps fashion, the leader of the free world charged, “HOW MUCH DID KAMALA HARRIS PAY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN FOR HIS POOR PERFORMANCE DURING HER CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT? WHY DID HE ACCEPT THAT MONEY IF HE IS SUCH A FAN OF HERS? ISN’T THAT A MAJOR AND ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION? WHAT ABOUT BEYONCÉ? …AND HOW MUCH WENT TO OPRAH, AND BONO???” As he did throughout Trump 1.0, the president is acting as if he’s an immature old man in a trailer park, not the head of the executive branch of the government. Such unhinged ranting will be the extent of all this. If there were to be any “investigation,” wouldn’t he start the process? Or at least push the Republicans in Congress to hold meaningless hearings?

Trumpenstein always finds time to respond to those who “disrespect” him. There aren’t many other billionaires who adopt this kind of ghetto mentality. He isn’t quite as proactive on carrying out his most hopeful campaign promises, however. Like actually doing a “mass deportation.” What happened to Tom “Mad Dog” Homan? He seemed like such a hard ass, didn’t he? Boris Karloff was pretty good at portraying demented mad scientists, too. That’s the entertainment biz for you. Trying to determine what is actually in Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax budget is as difficult as figuring out any other Trump policy. It’s a typically huge bill, so I haven’t read it, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in there about eliminating Social Security taxes. The most recent claim is that it eliminates taxes on overtime and tips. But is that only for government employees, who largely don’t work overtime? As for tips, that’s a good thing, but how many servers were reporting that anyhow?

Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill looks very much like previous budgets from other Republicans. Non-MAGA types. RINOs. He wants to retain his old tax rates, and that assures that, as always, the more income you have, the greater the tax cut. I’ve tried to explain that to blue collar supporters of Trump. “Tax cuts” are for the rich, because they have the most income. You can’t really cut income taxes on laborers, because they’re barely making any income. I wasn’t any more successful in trying to enlighten the Reagan supporters I worked with back in the 1980s. You’re not getting a tax cut. The CEO we all hate is. And what happened to Trump’s great suggestion of no taxes for anyone making less than $150,000? So in other words, meet the new Trumpenstein, same as the old Trumpenstein. No one’s impeaching him this time. There isn’t any phony “Russiagate” to contend with. Just Bruce Springsteen, I guess.

Trumpenstein 2.0 appears to be unraveling fast. His FBI director, Kash Patel, who we at least thought would be better than Hall of Fame Swamp Creature William Barr, just recently chimed in on the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein. Shockingly, unlike 100% of the MAGA faithful who hailed his appointment, Patel insists that Epstein killed himself. And sitting next to him was his assistant, former talk show host Dan Bongino, who expressed his strong agreement. In this regard, Bongino was going against 100% of his former radio audience. Bongino declared “I’ve seen the file.” Oh, you mean the one that the government says is missing all the stuff from Epstein’s safe? You know, that contained loads of video tapes and photos of compromised individuals, many of them undoubtedly famous? It’s astonishing that these figures can make these statements with straight faces. As the old expression goes, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, and still they lie.

So I suppose this assures us that there won’t be any “mass arrests” under Kash Patel. Remember “trust AG Barr?” So four more years of “two more weeks.” Really, how can they not have prosecuted the acting head of USAID, who wrote an email telling everyone to destroy evidence before DOGE could see it? That seems a lot more serious than a rape allegation from a mentally disturbed woman who couldn’t remember the year it happened, but what do I know? I didn’t even finish community college. Speaking of DOGE, what’s going on with that now? Did they ever begin auditing any other departments? Certainly not the promised audit of the Pentagon, as Trumpenstein pushed through a trillion dollar defense budget, the largest in history. You might even call it “big and beautiful.” Lots of bombs for the Hootie-Tooties in Yemen, and perhaps those “state sponsors of terrorism” in Iran.

I have to think that Trump is going to lose his MAGA base. He’s already lost Marjorie Taylor Greene. “I represent the base and when I’m frustrated and upset over the direction of things, you better be clear, the base is not happy,” Greene tweeted out earlier this month. “I campaigned for no more foreign wars. And now we are supposedly on the verge of going to war with Iran. “I don’t think we should be bombing foreign countries on behalf of other foreign countries especially when they have their own nuclear weapons and massive military strength….When you are losing MTG, you are losing the base. And Trump isn’t on the ballot in the future, so do the math on that.” Thomas Massie, the best the House has to offer, is despised by Trump. It’s a Trumpenstein thing, you wouldn’t understand. If the Republicans are no longer the Stupid Party, why isn’t Massie, or Greene, or Andy Biggs, Speaker of the House?

And Trump is now fired up over the belated admission by the establishment that Joe Biden was cognitively impaired during his presidency. He wants Congress to look into that. Sure, Kash Patel is working on indictments of key figures in the Biden administration as we speak. I don’t know if this is more important to Trumpenstein than Springsteen, Beyonce, Bono and other pretentious celebrities getting paid big money to support Kamala Harris. But it’s clearly a more pressing issue than our crumbling infrastructure. Or those new factories that have yet to be built, to go along with his tariffs. Or the corruption that is entrenched at all levels of the system, with no one ever held accountable for it. Trump once called it “draining the swamp.” Now in his second term, Trump has yet to touch a single Swamp creature. Bruce Springsteen will be indicted before James Comey or any other denizen of the Swamp.

On the treatment of Whites in South Africa, however, Trump is suddenly becoming bold. He admitted fifty four White South Africans into the country as political refugees. The same societal leaders that have been orgasmic over the immigration explosion during the last few decades suddenly found some migrants they didn’t like. It brought back memories of the handful of illegal immigrants that Ron DeSantis dropped off in Martha’s Vineyard a few years ago. Demonstrating that government can indeed respond on this issue, the Republican governor had those pathetic migrants escorted out of the One Percenter playground in hours. But the South African farmers were different; startlingly White, and bereft of any of the qualities that have made other African-Americans the toast of America 2.0. So it’s not all migrants they sympathize with, it’s only the nonwhite ones. Whites cannot be victims, cannot be persecuted. Period. Some migrants are more equal than others.

And then, topping that, Trump met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House. Going beyond the scripted scolding he gave Ukrainian comedian turned dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump hit all the right talking points. He even had the lights dimmed and played the videos of South African leaders urging that Whites be murdered, and their land stolen. It took some courage to make even this small, symbolic gesture. And it marked the first time that I know of, that Trump has ever mentioned the White race as president. He also pointed out the endless crosses adorning the highways, each commemorating a White farmer killed by Blacks. Trump is at least raising an issue which has never been raised in polite society before. And incurring even more wrath from the crowd that prefers their migrants to be exclusively nonwhite males of prime fighting age. So, give Trump his due here. Ramaphosa and his crew’s smiles betrayed a very wicked sense of humor.

So this was at least some kind of “winning.” But Trump’s “wins” are all like this; WWE style verbal salvos, fired at targets who are undeniably terrible people. As Trump himself said, “I don’t know what to do” about the plight of the White Afrikaners. We all enjoyed him throwing Zelenskyy out of the White House. But it appears that the little penis piano playing leader hasn’t missed a single payment from the U.S. taxpayers. Is Trump going to intervene militarily in South Africa? Well, the Left would finally mention the word peace again in such a case. Bringing thousands of White migrants into this country certainly doesn’t solve the immigration problem. It may counter the Great Replacement in a small way, as young White Americans simply won’t have babies. Ultimately, Trump chewing out some horrific state controlled journalist, or a tyrannical foreign leader, is the only sign that he is fighting the elite.

Read the Whole Article

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Anyone who says Gaza will be at peace if Hamas just surrenders and releases the hostages is either knowingly sowing disinformation or ignorantly sowing misinformation. We need to make sure everyone’s clear on this so nobody can say they didn’t know after history unpacks this one.

Netanyahu has made it completely and unambiguously clear that even if Hamas surrendered today and released every single hostage, Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan will still need to be implemented as a precondition for ending the mass slaughter. To be absolutely 100 percent clear, Trump’s plan for Gaza is that “all” Palestinians be removed on a “permanent” basis, never allowed to return.

There is no way to permanently remove all Palestinians from a Palestinian territory without material coercion — meaning more mass scale violence and siege warfare. There is also no way to argue that this mass displacement would be voluntary even without further violence, since Israel has been deliberately and systematically making the Gaza Strip uninhabitable by destroying civilian infrastructure. Forcing them to choose between starvation in an uninhabitable wasteland or submit to ethnic cleansing is exactly the same as forcing them out at gunpoint.

It was obvious that this was Israel’s plan for Gaza in October 2023; plans to move the civilian population out of the enclave were already being circulated within days of the onslaught. But that wasn’t Israel’s official and openly stated policy until the Trump administration; now that Israel is clearly and explicitly stating this agenda in public, there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to continue circulating the lie that the suffering of the people of Gaza ends if Hamas surrenders. What happens is that their homeland will be permanently taken away from them as they are shipped off to a foreign land, and Gaza will cease to exist as a Palestinian territory.

That’s not peace. Or if it is it’s the peace of an empty room; the peace of a room full of corpses. Saying you made peace by removing the Palestinians from Palestine is like saying you settled an argument by decapitating one of the arguers.

That’s the only “peace” the people of Palestine will experience if Hamas lays down its arms. Losing everything they’ve ever known forever, on pain of death.

That is the inconvenient truth people are trying to hide when they say “This all ends when Hamas surrenders and releases the hostages.” That is the deception they are sowing.

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Israel bombed the home of two married doctors in Gaza on Friday, killing nine of their children and critically injuring their sole surviving son. The father of the children was also severely injured in the attack, while their mother, while still working at the nearby hospital, received the charred bodies of her children. They were too badly burned to be recognized.

This one incident, just by itself, is vastly more newsworthy and deserving of attention than two Israeli embassy staff members being killed in Washington. But news coverage hasn’t reflected this, because Palestinians aren’t regarded as human beings in the mainstream western press.

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She heard a Muslim listening to a Muslim sermon on the radio and it made her feel scared because she’s a racist, and now she wants all American Jews to have firearms. That’s her whole entire story. I just saved you two minutes and eight seconds. https://t.co/PJIIsydgbG

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 24, 2025

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The Guardian has published an opinion piece by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett titled “As Gaza’s children are bombed and starved, we watch — powerless. What is it doing to us as a society?”, which is noteworthy because it somehow never mentions the word “Israel” or “Israeli” one single time throughout the entire article. It doesn’t even mention Netanyahu.

This is a particularly glaring example of the way the western press have been discussing the Gaza holocaust as some kind of unfortunate tragedy that is just passively happening to the Palestinian people, as though it’s a natural disaster or something. It’s like bombs and siege warfare are just the weather over there. Like “Oh it’s a bit bomby and faminy in Gaza today, and it makes me feel sad!”

This genocide is exposing the mass media like nothing else in my lifetime.

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Israel supporters have different packages of apologia for each ideological group, with different narratives explaining why Israel’s abuses are justified to all the different groups in language designed to appeal to each faction.

Are you a progressive humanitarian? Israel apologists have a narrative package custom designed to appeal to your support for the Jewish people and the revulsion you feel toward their historic persecution.

Are you a conservative who’s fearful of Muslims and terrorism? Israel apologists have a completely different package of narratives designed to appeal to your fears and explain why Islamic extremism must be defeated to protect western civilization.

Are you a fundamentalist Christian? There’s a whole other package of narratives designed to explain why support for Israel is actually commanded by God in the Holy Bible.

Are you a fascist who thinks Arabs should be wiped off the face of the earth? Boy howdy do the Israel apologists ever have some narratives for you.

Israel apologists understand that different political factions are responsive to different types of messaging, so each political faction gets its own messaging package.

The only ones they can’t effectively target with carefully constructed narratives are the groups who are already forcefully pro-Palestine, predominantly on the leftmost end of the political spectrum. So they just work on silencing, stigmatizing and marginalizing those groups instead.

It’s all about controlling the narrative. Israel apologists understand the power of narrative control better than perhaps any other major ideological faction on earth, and you see it at play throughout every facet of our society. That’s one of the many reasons they were so successful at manufacturing support for Israel in the west up until history’s first live-streamed genocide caused them to finally start losing control of the story.

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Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, just declassified a 13 December 2021 National Counterterrorism Center memo warning that Domestic Violent Extremists “will threaten to mobilize to violence in opposition to new or expanding COVID-19 related mandates.”

The memo is a classic tactic used by incipient totalitarian regimes to associate rationale criticism of state policy with domestic terrorism. In the initial stage of erecting a totalitarian state, such associations are qualified with statements that pay lip service to constitutional protections, as does this particular memo (see page one below).

However, if state agencies that promulgate this ideology are not rigorously opposed, they will almost certainly advance to the next stage of removing the distinction between peaceful regime critics and violent extremists. The totality of circumstances indicates that the Biden administration was rapidly heading down this path in the autumn of 2021.

The extreme persecution of Dr. Peter McCullough in 2021—with multiple accusations of “spreading dangerous information” used to justify firing him from his ranking position at a major medical center, harassing him with lawsuits, and forcing him to undergo “struggle sessions” before a kangaroo court erected by the American Board of Internal Medicine—were animated with this totalitarian spirit.

The December 13, 2021 NCIS memo is a perfect expression of why we decided to start the McCullough Foundation to oppose tyranny masquerading as public health policy.

The world is now awakening to the fact that we at the McCullough Foundation were fully justified when we raised the alarm in 2021 that COVID-19 vaccines presented an unacceptably high risk of inducing myocarditis, especially in young males.

Thanks to the tireless clinical observations, investigative scholarship, and testimony of Dr. McCullough and his staff at the McCullough Foundation, the truth of this vitally important matter has prevailed.

On May 21, 2025—the same day that Dr. McCullough testified before the Senate about COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis—the FDA issued a directive requiring COVID vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna to update their warnings about the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

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