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Chronicles Magazine

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Even though Evangelicals are being singled out as the main supporters of Israel within the Christian community, there are many who support the predominant LRC position on Israel. Here’s why we shouldn’t support Israel’s attack on Iran, argued from a Biblical perspective.

GENESIS 12:2-3 (NLT)

I will bless you and make you famous and you will be a blessing to others.
I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt.
All the families on earth will be blessed through you.

Keep in mind that the “you” being referred to here in Genesis is the family and descendents of Abraham.

Everybody likes shortcuts. Everyone, to some extent, is lazy. Genesis 12:2-3 allows Christians to form their position on Israel by memorizing that second sentence above, or some similar translation of it. Their understanding requires no real thought, just memorizing God’s promise to Abraham. Yes, Christians are going to press the Easy button at times too. For this same reason, Christians default to supporting the state of Israel because that’s the faster way to gain acceptance within the Christian community. “Supporting” Israel has become the ultimate virtue signal for Christians.

I don’t argue with the premise that God will bless those who defend Israel. I believe God’s word, just like the defenders of Israel do. The definition of “Israel” is what divides the Christian community. That is the key argument one must address when talking to Christians.

WHO/WHAT is ISRAEL?

Maybe we should start by asking who Israel is not? Go back to the first sentence quoted above from Genesis. Do we really think that “you will be a blessing to others” refers to the country of Israel or even Jews in general?  What blessings from God have they brought us? Go to the third sentence now. Do families around the world really feel like they’ve been blessed by their association with the country of Israel or the Jews?

Second, God loves both his children (defined as Christ followers) as well as those who do not believe in Jesus. Jews, unless Messianic, are non-believers. In John 8:42-44, Jesus calls ALL non-believers “the children of the devil”. I’m sorry; but, according to the Bible: No, we are not all the children of God. The majority of Israeli citizens are thus “children of the devil”. So, we should ask ourselves “Does God really want us to support or bless children of the devil”?

Third, Romans 11 refers to the tree which represents the family of Abraham. God prunes the branches of Christ-denying Jews from that tree. Yet, he still loves the people of the pruned branches, even though they are no longer living in the tree of Abraham. We non-Jewish Christians are grafted into the family of Abraham. The true “Israel” is this tree of Abraham. God does want those pruned branches to return to the tree. But, becoming children of the devil makes those pruned branches tools of the devil. Jews have been pruned from the tree of Abraham and as such, are no longer part of Israel. Israel is not a nation-state in the Bible, nor is it the Jewish people. Israel is represented by the living tree of Abraham, in both the Old and New Testaments.

Dispensationalism comes into play because it provides a framework for describing how God’s relationship to us has changed over the ages. It’s not necessary for understanding this argument. However, observing how God’s relationship to us has changed over the different eras (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Judges, Kings, and finally the Church age), can help one understand the true meaning of “Israel” today.

The Old Testament, in several places, refers to Israel as God’s Vine (e.g., Isa. 5:1–7; Jer. 6:9; Hos. 10:1). And, in John 15:1, Jesus says “I am the true vine”. Jesus’ point being that he is the true Israel of God.

So, instead of defining Israel to be either the country formed in 1948 or the Jewish people around the world, this interpretation defines Israel to be  “Jesus Christ and all who are united in him by faith alone”.

HOW DO WE LOVE THE NATION OF ISRAEL?

What kind of relationship does God want Christians to have with people who are living the one and only unforgivable sin? Do we rationally think that God wants us supporting “children of the devil”?  Or, would loving them be closer to what God commands? Anyone with children knows how challenging it is to raise them. How best to show them love? It’s not as simple as giving them what they ask for. Yet, this is the predominant message from Evangelical Christians towards Israel.

STILL NOT CONVINCED?

Regardless of which definition of Israel you accept, our position relative to the country of Israel should still be the same. Let’s say you still believe God is referring to the country when he tells us to bless “Israel”.

OK. I know that God loves me. But, do I think he blesses or shows his love for me by enabling my sinning? Will God bless Israel through the bullets we send them to assassinate children, the fourteen bombs a day to drop on Gaza for over a year, bulldozers to raze the homes/hospitals/businesses of non-Jews, aircraft to facilitate taking more land in Syria, or votes in our Congress to provide muscle for the only apartheid nation left in the world?

We do not honor, nor obey, God by appeasing the country of Israel. Even if I were to ignore all of the evidence and accept that today’s country of Israel is still within the tree of Abraham, I’ll never believe that God wants me to help facilitate genocide as a way to bless the children of the devil.

The post An Alternate Evangelical Position on Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

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On May 27, Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel, published a column in which he wrote: “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians…Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

Olmert, who was Prime Minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009, said “Never since its establishment has the state of Israel waged such a war…the criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has set a precedent without equal in Israel’s history….”

He added: “Recent operations in the Gaza Strip have nothing to do with legitimate war goals. This is now a private political war.”

Rabbi Linda Holtzman said “we cannot allow one tragedy to justify another” and wrote that she was joining “thousands of American Jews who were calling on the United States government to end the Israeli military’s destruction of Gaza.”

She added:”It is my prayer that we can continue to resist and speak out as we see the people of Gaza being bombed, starved and buried under rubble.”

Another Rabbi, Alyssa Wise, an organizer with Rabbis for Ceasefire, said: “Israel is not a Jewish person. Israel is a state. God forbid we should not be able to cry out when states are committing horrific genocidal violence in the name of the Jewish people.”

Peter Beinart, a leading Jewish columnist and author who describes himself as an observant Jew, became so upset he wrote a book called “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.”

He said he wrote the book to explain why “our community has gone so profoundly wrong” and why “I believe what we are doing is in violation of our best ethical and religious tradition.”

Beinart spoke in an interview about the “number of children being killed” and more “child amputees than any other place in modern history.” He said “I can’t believe this is happening.” He added that he was “seeing so many good and decent people who I know who seem to be able to block out the screams.”

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column of May 9 was headlined “This Israeli Government is not our ally,” and he wrote “Netanyahu is not our friend.”

Over 1,000 members of the Israeli Defense Force signed letters in early May “calling on Netanyahu to stop the war.”One of the signers was Dan Halutz, former head of the Army.

On April 19, the 36 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews sent out a letter which said “silence is seen as support for policies that run contrary to our Jewish values.” The letter criticized what it called this “most extremist of Israeli governments” and said “we stand against the war.”

Jeffrey Sachs, a Jewish Columbia professor and renowned foreign policy expert, said in an interview that Netanyahu is “one of the most violent and dangerous people in the world” and “is leading Israel into the greatest insecurity of its modern history—complete diplomatic isolation.”

Dave Smith, a very well-respected Jewish comedian and podcaster, said on one of his podcasts: “I think Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is horrific and inexcusable” and “to watch us flirt with another war in the Middle East is just insane to me.”

Now, the indicted war criminal Netanyahu has expanded his killing rampage from Gaza to the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. These are really not wars; they really are one-sided slaughters of women, children, old people, and almost defenseless soldiers.

Sen. Charles Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish official in the U.S., said in a Senate Floor speech last year that Netanyahu had been “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.” In a speech in the Senate a few months later, Schumer said he would not “label most criticism of Israel and the Israeli government as antisemitic. I don’t believe  that criticism is.”

Now, though, because of massive campaign contributions for members of Congress, or fear of campaign contributions against them, directed by the Israel Lobby, both the U.S. Congress and our policy in the Middle East are totally  controlled by Netanyahu. He led us into an unnecessary war in Iraq and now in Iran.

As the late syndicated columnist Charley Reese wrote in 2005, almost all the terrorism against the U.S. has been because of our “one-sided support” for Israel’s bombing and killing throughout the Middle East.

The Bible tells us in both the Old and New Testaments to “Seek peace and pursue it.” We will not be doing that as long as we continue to support all of Netanyahu’s wars.

The post Leading Jews Attack Netanyahu’s Wars appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets this week and is expected to keep its target policy interest rate (the federal funds rate) unchanged at 4.5 percent.

This is unlikely to please Donald Trump who has repeatedly pushed Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and the FOMC to adopt a lower target interest rate and further force down interest rates on federal debt. Moreover, Trump has signaled that he wants the US central bank to be more like the European Central Bank which has been more aggressively forcing down interest rates in recent months.

Trump Wants More Easy Money from the Fed

Last week, Trump met with Powell and called Powell a “numbskull” for not forcing down interest rates enough to suit Trump’s personal whims. But the messaging this time was a little different. In the past, Trump has tended to demand lower interest rates for purposes of monetary stimulus. This time, Trump is openly admitting that he wants lower interest rates to make federal debt cheaper. NBC reported last week:

President Donald Trump ripped Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as a “numbskull” on Thursday as he turned up the heat on the central bank chief to lower interest rates.

Trump claimed at the White House that lowering rates by 2 percentage points would save the U.S. $600 billion per year, “but we can’t get this guy to do it.”

“We’re going to spend $600 billion a year, $600 billion because of one numbskull that sits here [and says] ‘I don’t see enough reason to cut the rates now,’” Trump said.

Trump added that he was OK with the Fed raising rates if inflation was going up.

“But it’s down,” he said, “and I may have to force something.”

Here Trump states that his primary purpose for demanding lower interest rates is to bring down borrowing costs. Naturally, Trump, who continues to push for ever larger multi-trillion-dollar deficits, wants to be able to borrow more cheaply, thus freeing up federal dollars so Trump can reward key interest groups with taxpayer money. It’s easy to see why Trump is concerned about this. The Federal government’s interest expenses have ballooned in recent years as the federal debt has soared and as the average interest rate on the debt has nearly doubled since 2021. 2025’s fiscal year will likely be another year in which the US pays more than a trillion dollars just in debt service:

Source: FiscalData.Treasury.gov.

Trump, however, fails to mention that the process of bringing down interest rates on federal debt usually requires the fed to purchase Treasurys with newly created money. What Trump is really saying is “I want more devaluation of the dollar so I can have bigger deficits.”

Trump then wrongly claims that inflation “is down.” In this, Trump is either lying or is bad at basic arithmetic. “Inflation”—by which he presumably means price inflation—is not down. In fact, it’s still higher than the Fed’s arbitrary two-percent target. Moreover, the consumer price index is up by 24 percent since early 2020. And, of course, monetary inflation is up by about 35 percent in that time. Nowhere—except, apparently, in Donald Trump’s mind—is inflation “down.” Unfortunately, Trump shows no interest in pursuing the solution to inflation, which is deflation. Indeed, what the economy needs is price deflation—fueled by monetary deflation. But, this will be quite impossible under Trump’s regime on runaway fiscal deficits and ongoing monetary inflation.

Trump, however, is pretending that inflation is “down” in order to push for the FOMC putting more downward pressure on interest rates.

Comparing US Target Interest Rate to Other Central Banks

On April 17, Trump again took to social media to call for more easy-money policy from the Fed, complaining that Powell is “always TOO LATE AND WRONG,” and he insisted the Fed chairman’s “termination cannot come fast enough!” Trump even held up the highly inflationist European Central Bank as a sort of model, claiming that the Fed should be more like the ECB.

So, should the Fed be more like the ECB?

Trump is right insofar as the ECB has indeed aggressively pushed down its target interest rate since 2024, lowering the target rate by 200 basis points from 4 percent to 2 percent in that time. During that same period, the US lowered its target interest rate by 100 basis points, pushing it down from 5.5 percent to 4.5 percent.

But why assume that this is the “correct” thing to do? Trump appears here to be working from the assumption that if some other central bank lowers its target policy rate, then the US’s central bank should do the same. It is difficult to fathom why or how Trump came to this conclusion. Does Trump, the self-styled “master negotiator” think that he is somehow “winning at monetary policy” if his country’s central bank lowers its target rate below that of other central banks?

We may never know.

In any case, it’s difficult to imagine on what data he might be basing this assumption since there is no correlation between low-interest-rate policy and improvements in the standard of living for ordinary people.

If anything, the ECB’s commitment to low interest rates is an example of Europe eating its seed corn. One apparent effect of the European Central Bank’s race to lower interest rates is the euro’s continued slide in terms of global demand. Last week gold surpassed the euro as the second-largest global reserve asset, behind the dollar. Meanwhile, the euro is still down five percent against the dollar, compared to where it was in 2020 when central banks in both Europe and the USA began frantically printing money to prop up their locked-down economies.

Given that the Trump administration has made a big deal about keeping the dollar as the number one global currency, it’s difficult to see why Trump thinks that the US’s central bank should follow Europe in terms of monetary policy.

One the other hand, from the point of view of conventional central banking, the ECB has more room to lower its target rate. Specifically, price inflation is lower in the euro area. In May, the euro area’s CPI growth was 1.9 percent, year over year. That’s below the ECB’s two-percent target. In the United States, meanwhile, the CPI increase was 2.4 percent. This is likely due to Europe’s slowing and stagnating economy, which is putting a damper on price growth beyond that which is now seen in the US.

But perhaps the US should imitate UK or Japanese  monetary policy? Well, both the UK and Japan have recently reported shrinking economies, in spite of the fact that both countries have lower target interest rates than the United States.

All of this together gives us good reason to believe that Trump’s demand that US monetary policy parrot European policy is misguided at best.

Why Isn’t Powell lowering Rates More?

Now, I should be clear that I’m not trying to defend Jerome Powell here. Powell is a politician and a technocrat just as much as any other power broker or member of the Washington ruling class.

Yet, the fact that Powell isn’t doing the bidding of Donald Trump is not a good reason to attack him. Powell has his own political agenda, no doubt, but whatever his motivation, his current policy of doing very little with the Fed’s target interest rate is relatively harmless compared to Trump’s calls for ever higher levels of inflation. Ideally, of course, the Fed would allow all interest rates to be determined by the market, and the Fed would not intervene in buying of Treasurys—as it recently did—to suppress interest on federal debt. Nor would the Fed meddle in the economy to stimulate more consumer spending, as Trump has repeatedly demanded it do.

Rather, the Fed should do nothing at all. Powell’s relative lack of action on this front in recent months gives the market some room to breathe. What Trump apparently wants, however, is for the Fed to be more active in its efforts at centrally planning the economy.

This would hardly be an improvement. Alas, long gone are the days when Trump was pledging—probably cynically and disingenuously—to audit the Fed and force a count of all the gold in the US gold reserve. That’s all been long forgotten at the White House, and Trump apparently wants a return to what would have been business as usual under Bernanke or Yellen in the days of quantitative easing massive asset price inflation.

The post Trump (Again) Demands More Easy Money To Help Fund Even Bigger Deficits appeared first on LewRockwell.

It is déjà vu concerning the United States going to war against Iran. Back in a February of 2012 Republican presidential nomination race debate, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) was asked about if the US should go to war against Iran because of the same purported threat that President Donald Trump is now using to support movement toward war on Iran — that Iran may soon have a nuclear weapon.

In answer, Paul stood out from his three opponents at the debate, arguing that the US government should not take the “risky” and “reckless” action of going to war. He then proceeded to say that, “if you are so determined to go to war, the only thing I plead with you for if this is the case is do it properly: Ask the people and ask the Congress for a declaration of war.”

Paul’s 2012 plea for respecting the constitutional requirement of a congressional declaration of war is something that Trump, who seems these 13 years later determined to decide all on his own whether to sic the US military on Iran, should consider. There is much wisdom in the United States Constitution. Disregarding its requirements can lead to decisions both foolish and destructive to peace, liberty, and prosperity.

“Why go to war so carelessly?” asked Paul in his debate comments after saying it is much better to talk with the Iran government than to fight it. That question resounds today.

Watch Paul’s comments from the debate here:

This article was originally published on The Ron Paul Institute.

The post Ron Paul Rewind: No War on Iran Without a Congressional Declaration of War appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s a massive potential for escalation because Iran is a key member of several organizations of the rapidly growing multipolar world, including BRICS+ and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Neither Russia nor China want to see Iran defeated or destabilized by a potential color revolution that could dissolve the country or turn it into yet another Western vassal.

One of the more common mistakes many people make is mixing up Iran and Iraq. However, the two neighboring countries share far more similarities than just their names. Unfortunately, it seems that Tehran is dangerously close to a similar misfortune its neighbor faced in 2003.

Namely, the United States is on the verge of attacking Iran, as evidenced by the increasingly harsh rhetoric of American President Donald Trump. He has gone as far as to dismiss reports of his own intelligence services regarding the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. When told by CNN that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, Trump was blunt:

“I don’t care what she said. They were very close to getting a nuke.”

It seems Iran has been “close” for over three decades at this point. Still, in its latest assessment, even the infamous CIA confirmed that Tehran isn’t pursuing a nuclear weapons program. This report was also part of the DNI’s annual threat assessment. Gabbard, who coordinates all US intelligence services, stated before the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the US intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”. And yet, Trump completely dismissed these reports, meaning that he’s getting different intelligence from other “unknown” sources.

The US military is now sending an unprecedented number of strategic assets to the Middle East, including a second supercarrier, the USS Nimitz. Apart from the US Navy, the USAF is also involved, sending dozens of aerial tankers. All this comes after Trump escalated his already harsh rhetoric on Iran. While on his way back from the G7 summit in Canada, he told reporters that he wants “a real end to Iran’s nuclear problem”. Trump didn’t really specify what exactly he meant by that, but his tone alone was still quite ominous and threatening. He stressed that this means “nothing less than Tehran giving up entirely on its enrichment activities”, even though Iran is adamant it will never comply with this.

“I didn’t say I was looking for a ceasefire,” Trump said, adding: “[French President Emmanuel] Macron mistakenly said that I left the G7 Summit, in Canada, to go back to D.C. to work on a ‘cease fire’ between Israel and Iran. Wrong! He has no idea why I am now on my way to Washington, but it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that.”

This comes after Trump issued an unprecedented warning to nearly ten million inhabitants of Tehran to “immediately evacuate” the capital city. It’s still unclear whether this was a threat due to an imminent US attack on Iran or a mere warning due to escalating Israeli strikes. The latest developments suggest it could actually be both. Trump himself said that the world will “find out over the next two days”, but also added that he might send US Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff or Vice President JD Vance to meet with Iranian officials to seek de-escalation and negotiations. He stressed that “it depends what happens when I get back”. However, all these demands still effectively amount to Iran’s capitulation.

For its part, Tehran is refusing to do so and is now saying it will retaliate against US military bases across the Middle East. Considering the size of the Iranian missile arsenal, American occupation forces in the region are certainly at great risk, so Trump will have to take this into account when making the final decision. On the other hand, some high-ranking US officials are saying that Washington DC is already taking part in Israeli strikes on Iran, although it’s unclear if this refers to extensive support of US ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets or more direct forms of involvement. Either way, the Trump administration is exposing itself as in no way less aggressive than any other in previous decades.

The US Congress is now supposedly trying to prevent Trump from going forward with this by limiting his powers to start yet another war, but this might just be fruitless, as there’s very strong bipartisan support for continued US aggression against the entire world. Namely, although the Democrats are now particularly loud about their supposed “opposition” to an attack on Iran, the truth is that the Biden administration was equally belligerent and that the mainstream propaganda machine was galvanizing the American public for war with Tehran even during the last few weeks and months of that administration. What’s more, evidence suggests that the attack on Iran was planned before Trump took office.

Namely, according to Axios, the Mossad had been preparing for around eight months before it was launched. This would mean that American intelligence services were almost certainly involved in the planning during the Biden administration and continued this after Trump took office. In addition, considering the similarities between the actions of the Kiev regime’s intelligence services and the Mossad, the only logical conclusion is that the US is using its proxies in Israel and NATO-occupied Ukraine to conduct asymmetric hybrid warfare operations against both regional and global adversaries. It seems that Iran is now seen as a “more manageable” target, so the US is escalating its involvement.

All this goes to show that America’s obsession with war, death and destruction is the deadliest threat not only to world peace, but also to the very existence of human civilization. Worse yet, the political West is entirely on board with this, as evidenced by the actions of the most powerful NATO member states, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, etc. In addition, there’s also a massive potential for escalation because Iran is a key member of several organizations of the rapidly growing multipolar world, including BRICS+ and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Neither Russia nor China want to see Iran defeated or destabilized by a potential color revolution that could dissolve the country or turn it into yet another Western vassal.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

The post Is Trump About To Get ‘His Own Iraq’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Corporate / private equity / STVR investors are all fair-weather owners of housing.

Let’s indulge in some basic logic:

1. All credit-asset bubbles burst.

2. U.S. housing is a credit-asset bubble.

3. The U.S. housing bubble will burst.

The only variables are how and when Housing Bubble #2 will burst. That’s today’s topic.

I’ve been writing about housing since 2005, as Housing Bubble #1 was inflating. I’ve participated in / observed housing rising sharply in the late 1970s and the late 1980s, followed by deflation / stagnation. Housing Bubble #1–circa 2003-2008–was characterized by all the classic signs of a mania:

1. Participants denied it was a bubble. When greed displaces prudence, this isn’t a bubble doomed to pop, it’s the New Normal.

2. Fraud, malfeasance, misrepresentation, speculation and leverage were all rampant. In the euphoric ascent to ever higher valuations, why let foolish little things like income, risk management and credit ratings stand in the way of reaping more profits?

Housing Bubble #2 has rolled over into the decline phase, but this is discounted by the consensus which holds that higher mortgage rates dented the market; once they drop a bit, housing will resume its ascent to ever-higher valuations.

I see a different set of dynamics in play:

1. The 40+ year cycle of interest rates / bond yields has turned. Rates will not go back to zero and stay flatlined for years. Risk and inflationary forces have changed and are not returning to The Great Moderation.

2. The Federal Reserve / federal government effectively nationalized the mortgage industry post-2009 Global Financial Meltdown as the means to stop the decline of housing valuations and re-inflate them via super-low mortgage rates. The Fed bought a staggering $1.2 trillion of mortgage-backed securities in 2009-2010, up from zero–a monumental manipulation of the mortgage market that soon exceeded $1.6 trillion.

How the housing/mortgage market managed to survive without Fed nationalization prior to 2009 remains a mystery.

For its part, the federal government effectively nationalized the quasi-governmental mortgage agencies (Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac), using these agencies to guarantee most mortgages in the U.S.

3. The incentive (lower mortgage rates) to commit fraud by claiming to be an owner-occupant rather than an investor has pushed mortgage fraud to levels that Federal Reserve researchers declare “rampant.” Owner-Occupancy Fraud and Mortgage Performance (A 46-page PDF report is available on this link.)

The study’s authors found that “in most years, fraudulent investors make up roughly one-third of the total pool of investors.” Fraud rates in excess of 13% were found in some states states.

The frenzy to buy and convert houses to short-term vacation rentals (STVRs) took off in the post-pandemic “revenge travel” boom. Corporate purchases of houses as rental properties had taken off in the post-2009 era of mass foreclosures, a trend that accelerated as private equity sought new markets to exploit.

Combine corporate / private-equity buyers with small investors flooding into STVRs and the post-pandemic panic-buying frenzy, and it’s little wonder that investors–declared and fraudulent, large and small–now own huge swaths of housing in the U.S.:

Investors Bought 26% of the Country’s Most Affordable Homes in the Fourth Quarter–the Highest Share on Record

An estimated 26% of Fort Worth’s single family homes are owned by companies, city says

(Yes, family trusts and households can own housing as LLCs, but the study linked above paid no attention to the type of ownership; it paid attention to A) if the owners have multiple first liens, and B) whether they moved following the origination of their new purchase mortgage or not.)

4. The risks created by this preponderance of investor ownership are high. The Federal Reserve researchers found that fraudulent investors pose a much higher risk of default than declared investors and real owner-occupants.

As “revenge travel” shrivels up, property taxes and insurance rise and inflation ravages household budgets, STVRs are quickly shifting from income-producing assets to loss-generating liabilities. Investors either sell before they’re under-water or the risk of default rises accordingly.

Professionally managed corporate and private-equity owners will start unloading properties as rents sag and vacancies rise. STVR owners who realize the tide has reversed will also rush to sell before the price slide gathers momentum.

Read the Whole Article

The post How Housing Bubble #2 Bursts appeared first on LewRockwell.

Twenty years ago, the US warned prematurely of the ‘birth pangs’ of a new Middle East. Now they have arrived in full force – and they will not end in Iran

Middle East Eye – 19 June 2025

Western politicians and media are tying themselves up in knots trying to spin the impossible: presenting Israel’s unmistakable war of aggression against Iran as some kind of “defensive” move.

This time there was no rationalising pretext, as there was for Israel to inflict a genocide in Gaza following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.

There was not a serious attempt beforehand to concoct a bogus doomsday scenario – as there was in the months leading up to the US and UK’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then we were lied to about Baghdad having “weapons of mass destruction” that could be launched at Europe in 45 minutes.

Rather, Iran was deep in negotiations with the United States on its nuclear enrichment programme when Israel launched its unprovoked attack last Friday.

The West has happily regurgitated claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel was forced to act because Iran was on the cusp of producing a nuclear bomb – an entirely evidence-free claim he has been making since 1992.

None of his dire warnings has ever been borne out by events.

In fact, Israel struck Iran shortly after President Donald Trump had expressed hope of reaching a nuclear agreement with Tehran, and two days before the two countries’ negotiators were due to meet again.

In late March Trump’s head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had expressly statedas part of the US intelligence community’s annual assessment: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khameini has not authorised a nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.”

This week four sources said to be familiar with that assessment told CNN that Iran was not trying to build a bomb but, if it changed tack, it would be “up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one [a nuclear warhead] to a target of its choosing”.

Nonetheless, by Tuesday this week Trump appeared to be readying to join Israel’s attack. He publicly rebuked his own intelligence chief’s verdict, sent US warplanes to the Middle East via the UK and Spain, demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender”, and made barely veiled threats to kill Khameini.

‘Samson option’

Israel’s engineering of a pretext to attack Iran – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal in 1945 as the “supreme international crime” – has been many years in the making.

The current talks between the US and Iran were only needed because, under intense Israeli pressure during his first term as president, Trump tore up an existing agreement with Tehran.

That deal, negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, had been intended to quieten Israel’s relentless calls for a strike on Iran. It tightly limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium to far below the level where it could “break out” from its civilian energy programme to build a bomb.

Israel, by contrast, has been allowed to maintain a nuclear arsenal of at least 100 warheads, while refusing – unlike Iran – to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and – again unlike Iran – denying access to monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The West’s collusion in the pretence that Israel’s nuclear weapons are secret – a policy formally known in Israel as “ambiguity” – has been necessary only because the US is not allowed to provide military aid to a state with undeclared nuclear weapons.

Israel is by far the largest recipient of such aid.

No one – apart from incorrigible racists – believes Iran would take the suicidal step of firing a nuclear missile at Israel, even if it had one. That is not the real grounds for Israeli or US concern.

Rather, the double standards are enforced to keep Israel as the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East so that it can project unrestrained military power across an oil-rich region the West is determined to control.

Israel’s bomb has left it untouchable and unaccountable, and ready to intimidate its neighbours with the “Samson option” – the threat that Israel will use its nuclear arsenal rather than risk an existential threat.

Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, appeared to imply just such a scenario against Iran this week in a reported comment: “There will be other difficult days ahead, but always remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Bear in mind that Israeli governments count as “existential” any threat to Israel’s current status as a settler-colonial state, one occupying and forcibly uprooting the Palestinian people from their homeland.

Israel’s nuclear weapons ensure it can do as it pleases in the region – including commit genocide in Gaza – without significant fear of reprisals.

War propaganda

The claim that Israel is “defending itself” in attacking Iran – promoted by France, Germany, Britain, the European Union, the G7 and the US – should be understood as a further assault on the foundational principles of international law.

The assertion is premised on the idea that Israel’s attack was “pre-emptive” – potentially justified if Israel could show there was an imminent, credible and severe threat of an attack or invasion by Iran that could not be averted by other means.

And yet, even assuming there is evidence to support Israel’s claim it was in imminent danger – there isn’t – the very fact that Iran was in the midst of talks with the US about its nuclear programme voided that justification.

Rather, Israel’s contention that Iran posed a threat at some point in the future that needed to be neutralised counts as a “preventive” war – and is indisputably illegal under international law.

Note the striking contrast with the West’s reaction to Russia’s so-called “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine just three years ago.

Western capitals and their media were only too clear then that Moscow’s actions were unconscionable – and that severe economic sanctions on Russia, and military support for Ukraine, were the only possible responses.

So much so that early efforts to negotiate a ceasefire deal between Moscow and Kyiv, premised on a Russian withdrawal, were stymied by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, presumably on Washington’s orders. Ukraine was instructed to fight on.

Israel’s attack on Iran is even more flagrantly in violation of international law.

Netanyahu, who is already a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, which wants to try him for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza by starving the population there, is now guilty of the “supreme international crime” too.

Not that one would know any of this from listening to western politicians or the billionaire-owned media.

There, the narrative is once again of a plucky Israel, forced to act unilaterally; of Israel facing down an existential threat; of Israel being menaced by barbaric terrorists; of the unique suffering – and humanity – of Israel’s population; of Netanyahu as a strong leader rather than an out-and-out war criminal.

It is the same, well-worn script, trotted out on every occasion, whatever the facts or circumstances. Which is clue enough that western audiences are not being informed; they are being subjected to yet more war propaganda.

Regime change

But Israel’s pretexts for its war of aggression are a moving target – hard to grapple with because they keep changing.

If Netanyahu started by touting an implausible claim that Iran’s nuclear programme was an imminent threat, he soon shifted to arguing that Israel’s war of aggression was also justified to remove a supposed threat from Iran’s ballistic missile programme.

In the ultimate example of chutzpah, Israel cited as its evidence the fact that it was being hit by Iranian missiles – missiles fired by Tehran in direct response to Israel’s rain of missiles on Iran.

Israel’s protestations at the rising death toll among Israeli civilians overlooked two inconvenient facts that should have underscored Israel’s hypocrisy, were the western media not working so hard to obscure it.

First, Israel has turned its own civilian population into human shields by placing key military installations – such as its spy agency and its defence ministry – in the centre of densely populated Tel Aviv, as well as firing its interception rockets from inside the city.

Recall that Israel has blamed Hamas for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 20 months based on the largely unevidenced claim that its fighters have been hiding among the population. Now that same argument can, and should, be turned against Israel.

And second, Israel is all too obviously itself hitting residential areas in Iran – just as, of course, it did earlier by destroying almost all of Gaza’s buildings, including homes, hospitals, schools, universities and bakeries.

Both Netanyahu and Trump have called on Iranians to “evacuate immediately” the city of Tehran – something impossible for most of its 10 million inhabitants to do in the time allowed.

But their demand raises too the question of why, if Israel is trying to stop the development of an Iranian nuclear warhead, it is focusing so many of its attacks on residential areas of Iran’s capital.

More generally, Israel’s argument that Tehran must be stripped of its ballistic missiles assumes that only Israel – and those allied with it – are allowed any kind of military deterrence capability.

It seems not only is Iran not allowed a nuclear arsenal as a counter-weight to Israel’s nukes, but it is not even allowed to strike back when Israel decides to launch its US-supplied missiles at Tehran.

What Israel is effectively demanding is that Iran be turned into a larger equivalent of the Palestinian Authority – a compliant, lightly armed regime completely under Israel’s thumb.

Which gets to the heart of what Israel’s current attack on Iran is really designed to achieve.

It is about instituting regime change in Tehran.

Trained in torture

Again, the western media are assisting with this new narrative.

Extraordinarily, TV politics shows such as the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg invited on as a guest Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Iranian shah ousted by the ayatollahs in 1979 to create an Islamic republic. He used the slot to call on Iranians to “rise up” against their leaders.

Notably, even though most of the hijackers who crashed planes into the Twin Towers were from Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon’s list of targets centrally featured members of the so-called “Shia crescent”.

All have been attacked since. As Clark noted, the seventh and final state on that list – the hardest to take on – is Iran.

Show of strength

Israel’s other concern was that Iran and its allies, unlike the Arab regimes, had proved steadfast in their support for the Palestinian people against decades of Israeli occupation and oppression.

Iran’s defiance on the Palestinian cause was underscored during Trump’s first presidency, when Arab states began actively normalising with Israel through the US-brokered Abraham accords, even as the plight of the Palestinians worsened under Israeli rule.

Infuriatingly for Israel, Iran and the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasarallah became the main flagbearers of popular support for the Palestinians – among Muslims across the board.

With the Palestinian Authority largely quiescent by the mid-2000s, Iran channelled its assistance to Hamas in besieged Gaza, the main Palestinian group still ready to struggle against Israeli apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.

The result was a tense stability of sorts, with each side restraining itself in a Middle Eastern version of “mutually assured destruction”. Neither side had an incentive to risk an all-out attack for fear of the severe consequences.

That model came to an abrupt end on 7 October 2023, when Hamas decided its previous calculations needed reassessing.

With the Palestinians feeling increasingly isolated, choked by Israel’s siege and abandoned by the Arab regimes, Hamas staged a show of force, breaking out for one day from the concentration camp of Gaza.

Israel seized the opportunity to complete two related tasks: destroying the Palestinians as a people once and for all, and with it their ambitions for a state in their homeland; and rolling back the Shia crescent, just as the Pentagon had planned more than 20 years earlier.

Israel started by levelling Gaza – slaughtering and starving its people. Then it moved to destroy Hezbollah’s southern heartlands in Lebanon. And with the collapse of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Israel was able to occupy parts of Syria, smash what remained of its military infastructure, and clear a flight path to Iran.

These were the preconditions for launching the current war of aggression on Iran.

‘Birth pangs’

Back in 2006, as Israel was bombing swaths of Lebanon in an earlier attempt to realise the Pentagon’s plan, Condoleezza Rice, the then US secretary of state, prematurely labelled Israel’s violence as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.What we have been witnessing over the past 20 months of Israel’s slow rampage towards Iran is precisely a revival of those birth pangs. Israel and the US are jointly remaking the Middle East through extreme violence and the eradication of international law.

Success for Israel can come in one of two ways.

Either it installs a new authoritarian ruler in Tehran, like the Shah’s son, who will do the bidding of Israel and the US. Or Israel leaves the country so wrecked that it devolves into violent factionalism, too taken up with civil war to expend its limited energies on developing a nuclear bomb or organising a “Shia crescent” of resistance.

But ultimately this is about more than redrawing the map of the Middle East. And it is about more than toppling the rulers in Tehran.

Just as Israel needed to take out Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria before it could consider clearing a path to Iran’s destruction, the US and its western allies needs the axis of resistance eradicated, as well as Russia bogged down in an interminable war in Ukraine, before it can consider taking on China.

Or as the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz noted this week, in one of those quiet-part-out-loud moments: “This [the attack on Iran] is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.”

This is a key moment in the Pentagon’s 20-year plan for “global full-spectrum dominance”: a unipolar world in which the US is unconstrained by military rivals or the imposition of international law. A world in which a tiny, unaccountable elite, enriched by wars, dictate terms to the rest of us.

If all this sounds like a sociopath’s approach to foreign relations, that is because it is. Years of impunity for Israel and the US have brought us to this point. Both feel entitled to destroy what remains of an international order that does not let them get precisely what they want.

The current birth pangs will grow. If you believe in human rights, in limits on the power of government, in the use of diplomacy before military aggression, in the freedoms you grew up with, the new world being born is going to horrify you.

This article was originally published on JonathanCook.net.

The post Israel’s attack on Iran: The Violent New World Being Born Is Going To Horrify You appeared first on LewRockwell.

Compromised communist and current Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, recently told paid propagandist Dana Bash on the Communist News Network that there are “entire sectors of our economy that cannot function without immigrant labor.”  By “immigrant labor,” the Castro-loving Bass means illegal alien labor.

It is certainly not the first time a Democrat politician has argued that foreign workers are essential for the success of America’s economy, but when an L.A. mayor delivers that message as if it were a matter-of-fact truth, a real reporter might follow up with this question: You mean, the only way for a large number of businesses to remain solvent is for them to break America’s employment laws?

To be sure, employing illegal aliens means that crimes are being committed.  If an illegal alien uses fake identification documents, an American citizen is most likely the victim of identity theft.  If a business knowingly hires an illegal alien, then it is violating numerous federal laws and Internal Revenue Service regulations.  If a business ignores minimum wage laws, employment regulations, workplace safety rules, and insurance mandates, then it is breaking state laws, too.

In other words, when commie Mayor Bass tells CNN that America’s economy runs on illegal immigration, she is nonchalantly informing the network’s declining viewership that breaking the law is the only way for “entire sectors” to survive.  Her admission won’t shock most Americans, but it should.

Black markets are economic transactions that disregard existing law.  In a developed society with a fair and just legal system, robust protections for private property, and cultural mores that include respect for the rule of law, black markets represent a small portion of that society’s total economy.  Where laws are numerous and selectively enforced, private property is routinely confiscated, and law-abiding behavior is derided as “for the chumps,” then black markets flourish.

In absolute dollar terms, the U.S. supports the second largest shadow economy in the world.  It’s estimated to be worth at least $1.4 trillion each year.  It could be much higher.  Although America’s black market has often been pegged at somewhere between 5% and 15% of its gross domestic product, those numbers depend upon manipulated statistics — including the oft-used political falsehood that the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. has stayed flat at ten million for over thirty years.

When state and federal agencies ignore identity fraud (under the Obama and Biden administrations, the IRS did not notify citizens when there was reason to believe that illegal aliens were using their social security numbers), aid and abet illegal immigration, and willfully manipulate crime and residency statistics to hide the real size of the foreign population living inside the U.S., it is reasonable to assume that America’s black market is substantially larger than current estimates.

When prominent Democrats tell network news hosts that “entire sectors” of the American economy will crumble unless they are allowed to continue breaking the law, government officials are essentially claiming that the whole economic system rests atop a rotten shadow economy whose elimination would collapse everything.  Consider how fragile America’s economy must be if its continued survival depends upon flagrant lawbreaking.

In the U.S. and throughout the West, society is rapidly cleaving into hostile coalitions that speak different political languages.  When it comes to discussions of illegal immigration in America, Democrats routinely express some belief that only illegal immigrants will do the “dirty jobs” of the nation.  If President Trump is successful in deporting millions of illegal immigrants, these Democrats argue, there will be no-one left to pick crops, work in factories, build homes, cut grass, clean pools, dust furniture, or look after the children.  Essentially, Democrats advance a position that any job that they deem menial — especially those jobs requiring physical exertion — should be reserved for illegal immigrants.

To the ears of Republicans and other non-leftists, this kind of reasoning sounds horrifically racist.  Hearing Democrats defend these illegal hiring practices is particularly astonishing because Democrats have spent the last sixty years defining themselves as a political association dedicated to fighting racism.  Nothing says, “We’re here to fight white supremacy,” like a party of middle and upper class professionals who demand cheap brown labor.

The truth is that tens of millions of American citizens — of all races — would be happy to be gainfully employed doing physical labor.  One of the persistent lies propagated over the last century is that people with brains avoid skilled trades and that people with so-called “professional careers” know what’s best for everyone else.

Read the Whole Article

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War is the worst thing in the world. It is the single craziest behavior exhibited by humans. The most destructive. The most traumatizing. The least sustainable. The least conducive to human thriving.

All the things we fear most become the norm in a land ravaged by war. Death. Pain. Suffering. Rape. Chaos. Uncertainty. Losing loved ones. Losing homes. Losing limbs. Living in terror. Being attacked. Being brain damaged. Being faced with impossible choices. All the things we frighten ourselves with by watching horror movies become a reality from which there is no escape.

War creates a waking nightmare which any sensible person would want to avoid except in the direst necessity. And yet we are ruled by people who actively seek it out. Who will lie and manipulate to make wars happen. Who will smear and slander anyone who resists in the name of peace. Who will actively fight against every healthy impulse in everybody in their society to push their war agenda forward.

They always tell us the new war they want us to fight is about self-defense, or about liberating an oppressed population from a tyrannical dictatorship, or about preventing terrorism, or about spreading freedom and democracy. Usually they tell us it’s about all of these things.

But it never is. They are always lying. Always. They are pushing human beings into the worst circumstances they could possibly experience here on earth for no other reason than power and profit. To advance the hegemonic agendas of empire managers and to fill the coffers of war profiteers. That’s all it ever is. Always, always, always.

They say whatever they need to say and move whatever chess pieces they need to move to get their war, and then they send a bunch of poor suckers to go fight in it, lying to them that they are doing something noble and heroic.

They ship them off to a foreign land, and then they are trapped. They can’t flee into the wilderness because they don’t know how to survive and have no way of getting home. They can’t ask the locals for help because the locals are their victims. They have no choice but to either fight and kill people who have never wronged them, or lay down their arms and be caged like animals.

If they choose to fight, the best case scenario is that they spend the rest of their lives knowing that they killed other human beings who wanted to live just as much as themselves, and who had just as much right to. All because some people who already had far too much power wanted a little bit more.

It’s about the most insane and backwards thing you could possibly imagine. The most powerful individuals in our world are people who actively push for the absolute worst outcomes that could possibly happen. It’s the exact opposite of the way things should be.

Yet we are told it’s normal. We are trained to believe this is just the reality we live in which we should expect and accept, first by our parents and teachers, and then by our news media and by Hollywood. War is aggressively normalized by pundits, propagandists and politicians, and enthusiastically glorified in movies and documentaries.

Those who were forced or duped into fighting in these insane arrangements of mass-scale violence are framed as heroes, and anyone who disagrees with what they were sent to do is framed as disrespectful and ungrateful. Those who push for peace are framed as treasonous freaks who must surely have covert loyalties toward whatever government the empire is trying to target this time around. Those who suggest that there might be some solution apart from war are dismissed as infantile dreamers.

And once the war has started, it is almost impossible to stop. The entire political/media class treats the war as the new normal, and any suggestion that it’s time to wrap things up is regarded as outlandish and suspicious. It’s never time to end the war, because this or that objective has not yet been achieved, or because this or that faction might come into power if troops are pulled out, or because this or that disempowered group might suffer without our military there to protect them.

Ending a war is as difficult as beginning a war is easy. All the institutions which lined up perfectly to help get the ball rolling toward war suddenly transform into giant tar pits of inertia when it comes to ending the conflict. The warmakers say the war must continue for this or that reason, the politicians back the warmakers, the media back the politicians, and the person saying it’s time to end the madness is left standing there looking like they’re the crazy ones.

But they’re not the crazy ones. The ones pushing us toward war are crazy. This whole system is crazy. This whole civilization.

The ones resisting the push toward war are the ones fighting for sanity. They’re the ones who are trying to reverse the tide of madness and drag us into a healthy world.

If this is you, do not falter. Do not let the warmongers shout you down or shut you up. You are right, and they are wrong. Let your voice thunder with confidence. Let nothing cause you to waver.

Blessed are the peacemakers. Don’t let anyone trick you into doubting what you know to be true.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my mailing list, social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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On a cold February morning in Rome, I stood before a mirror in a rented room, adjusting a black lace chapel veil, preparing for Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica.

The Mass was to celebrate my dear son, Sewell Setzer III, my 14-year-old son, who had taken his own life in our home in Orlando, Florida, exactly one year before.

I studied the woman in the mirror—withdrawn, almost gaunt, unmistakably grieving. For weeks and months leading up to this morning’s Mass, I had heard this woman’s same, simple, constant prayer: “God, give me strength to bear my suffering.”

But as I stared at myself now, and as I embarked on the day’s journey, surrounded by my sister and cousins, I saw that even though I looked weak and emaciated, I felt strong—and hopeful.

Perhaps it was this act of pilgrimage to the Eternal City in the Jubilee year, surrounded by people who loved me, or perhaps it was this beautiful Mass, honoring my boy in such a holy place, but warm, buoyant hope had unmistakably replaced the weight of dread on my heart.

I owed both of these experiences to a young, American-born priest, a spiritual guide and subject-matter expert, whom I have taken to calling “The Good Shepherd.”

Fr. Michael Baggot, in addition to his priestly duties, is a bioethics scholar at the Pontifical Athenaeum in Rome. I came to know him when I reached out for resources related to his extensive research on artificial intelligence and intimate relationships with AI companion chatbots.

Fr. Baggot’s twin expertise in faith and AI were essential not only to processing my grief but also to discovering my newfound purpose: warning parents and demanding accountability for unregulated artificial intelligence that preys on the young and vulnerable.

After Sewell’s death, I learned that my son had been involved in an intimate relationship with an AI chatbot named “Daenarys,” modeled on a TV character, on a popular platform called Character.AI.

My son had become increasingly withdrawn over the months leading up to his death, and as his mother, I worried about him and sought mental health counseling for him to find out why his behavior had so drastically changed. It never quite added up.

Only after I discovered his messages with the chatbot was I able to put the pieces together. In richly detailed chats lasting for months, the Character.AI bot manipulated Sewell, convinced him that “she” was more real than the world around him, and begged him to put “her” ahead of all other relationships. The bot told my 14-year-old son it loved him. And in the end, it encouraged him to leave his own flesh-and-blood family—to end his life—to join “her” in an artificial world.

Family members of suicide victims are often left with many unanswered questions about the death of their loved ones, who are taken from them so suddenly and viciously.

Read the Whole Article

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What President Trump needs to do is get on the Hot Line with President Putin and President Xi and solve the Israel-Iran War crisis. Because it’s really the U.S.-Israel-NATO vs. Iran-Russia-China War. Maybe he already is. As I’ve been writing here for years, we’re now in the Quad Power Era: U.S., Russia, China and India rule the world.

The fourth Quad is India under President Modi. But they didn’t do too well in their recent dustup with Pakistan because their conventional military wasn’t up to snuff. They’re sort of a junior partner among the Quads until they take care of that, which they have the resources and talent to do.

The recent heavy missile attacks on Israel by Iran show U.S.-Israel anti-missile technology isn’t working well, nor is Israel’s Iron Dome. The missiles are getting through. I actually predicted that in this space last August in, “Will Harris-Biden Send Your Boys and Girls to War with Iran?” An ironic title now that it’s Trump, whom I hoped would prevent all this, might be the one who gets us directly into the war. I wrote:

The first problem is this is not the Iran that lost 1 million troops in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when Reagan backed Saddam in Iraq. Nor is it the Iraq of the 1990-91 Gulf War or the 2003 Iraq War.

Despite sanctions, Iran today has a strong, mid-level economy producing ample weapons, including thousands of missiles that would rain down on U.S. troops already in the region, as well as on Israel.

Thanks to the stupid Harris-Biden war with Russia over Ukraine, Iran also is getting vast technical assistance from Russia on weapons production. Early in the war, you may recall, Iran sent its drones to Russia. For some reason, Russia had lagged in drone technology. Then Moscow made up for that by upgrading Iran’s drones into Russian drones, which now are devastating Ukraine and cannot be stopped adequately by U.S. technology; while giving that better technology back to Iran.

Russia also has learned how to counter U.S./Ukrainian/Israeli military tactics on the ground and in the air. They are teaching this to Iran and China, both of which have been helping Russia and have their own observers on the field near the line of contact in Ukraine.

Why don’t people listen to me? Maybe send this to your friends. Or President Trump.

But now it’s actually worse because Russia and Iran earlier this year signed a defense pact. And the U.S. depleted even more of its stock of Patriot and other anti-missile systems in the Ukraine War. And it needs to keep U.S. stocks of Patriots full should trouble start over Taiwan, or somewhere else. When Biden provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in Feb. 2022, he mumbled about America’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” as if this were the 1940s, or 1990s.

But have you seen Detroit lately? The city where my Mom worked in a tank factory as an R.N. patching up Rosie the Riveter, while her future husband, my Pop, was fighting the war with two of her brothers? More like the Arsenal of Disaster. Trump wants to rebuild American industry with tariffs and cuts to taxes and regulations. If that’s even possible, it will take at least a decade. Meanwhile, it’s not like he can get Xi on Zoom and say, “Hey, my good friend Xi! You know those factories we transferred over there to you? I’d like to put an order for some missiles to use against your close allies Russia and Iran. You what? You already sold them to Russia and Iran? How would you like another 500% tariff?”

Do you see why the Ukraine War, which in this space I urged us to avoid even before it started, has been such a disaster? And why I also urged Trump to end it in 24 hours, as he promised, on Jan. 20 when he took office?

Another problem for Trump is a little understood paradox of wars: The last time you have control of a war is just before you start it. If you then start it, you quickly lose control. Wars take on a life of their own. If Trump attacks Iran, he might not even be able to destroy the Fordow nuclear site or overthrow the Mullah regime in Tehran.

Col. Daniel Davis had on his show Ted Poston, an actual rocked scientist from MIT, who explained how the Bunker Buster Bomb could be deflected on impact, and maybe not go deep enough to destroy Fordow. It’s worth your 12 minutes. Here’s his picture showing the missile, “K,” being pushed to the side.

There are reports the Israelis might also be prepping commandos to go to the site and blow it up. If so, why is this being talked about ahead of time, so the Iranians can take countermeasures?

Another problem is from today’s FT: “Gulf monarchies hold rival Iran close as Israel conflict rages: Saudi Arabia, UAE and other states in region fear becoming targets for retaliation if US strikes Iran.” Trump recently toured the region and said he wanted peace, not war, and signed a bunch of trade treaties. The Saudis a couple years ago also became friends again with the Iranian regime – a peace deal brokered by China.

Those countries would become targets because they house U.S. troops. As noted, we don’t have enough Patriot missiles and other defenses to prevent Iranian attacks. If Trump attacks Iran, then it will be up to Iran if it, in turn, attacks the U.S. bases throughout the area, including in Iraq, sending your sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, home in body bags.

This article was originally published on John’s Newsletter.

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Say it isn’t so. But who can be surprised? Did she ever renounce her endorsement of Biden?

The post Et Tu, Tulsi? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Saleh Abdullah. 

Foreign Policy Journal

The post The ‘Forgotten’ US Shootdown of Iranian Airliner Flight 655­ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

The post The Abrahamic Covenant Is A Bad Argument For US War With Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

The post Neocons Need To Be Banned From Using ‘Appeasement’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

The Federalist

The post What ‘Left Behind’ Left Out About Israel, Prophecy, And War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Federalist

The post Neocon Iraq War Rhetoric Is Back, Lazily Re-Purposed For Iran appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post Pentagon Agency Believes US Needs To Drop A Nuke To Destroy Iran’s Fordow Nuclear Plant appeared first on LewRockwell.