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La creazione e la proliferazione delle banche centrali nel corso dell'ultimo secolo hanno promesso una maggiore stabilità finanziaria. Tuttavia, come dimostrano continuamente la storia e gli eventi attuali, non hanno impedito le crisi finanziarie. La loro frequenza e gravità hanno oscillato, ma non sono diminuite da quando le banche centrali sono diventate il principale soggetto nella regolamentazione dei mercati finanziari e negli interventi monetari. Al contrario, hanno introdotto nuove fragilità e modificato la natura, ma non la ricorrenza, delle turbolenze finanziarie. L'evidenza empirica sfata il mito secondo cui le banche centrali abbiano posto fine all'era delle crisi finanziarie frequenti. Indipendentemente dalla loro supervisione, un boom del credito ha preceduto una crisi bancaria su tre. Chi lo ha creato? Le banche centrali attraverso la manipolazione dei tassi d'interesse. Secondo documenti di lavoro dell'FMI, ci son ostate 147 crisi bancarie solo tra il 1970 e il 2011, in un'epoca di predominio delle banche centrali. Le crisi finanziarie rimangono un fenomeno globale persistente, che si verifica in cicli che coincidono con episodi di espansione del credito. Le banche centrali hanno spesso prolungato periodi di espansione con tassi bassi e acquisti di asset, e hanno creato bruschi momenti di crisi dopo aver commesso errori in materia di inflazione e rischi di credito. Tuttavia, a ogni crisi successiva, la soluzione è sempre stata la stessa: programmi di acquisto di asset più ampi, e aggressivi, e tassi reali negativi. Ciò significa che le banche centrali sono gradualmente passate dall'essere prestatori di ultima istanza a prestatori di prima istanza, un ruolo che ha amplificato le vulnerabilità economiche. A causa della globalizzazione e delle innovazioni finanziarie, le crisi tendono ad avere dimensioni più ampie e complesse, colpendo la maggior parte delle nazioni. Il profondo coinvolgimento delle banche centrali nei mercati fa sì che le loro linee di politica, come la liquidità di emergenza o gli acquisti di asset, mascherino i rischi sistemici, portando a fallimenti ritardati ma più impattanti. In molte economie avanzate le recenti crisi sono state innescate dall'accumulo di debito e dalle distorsioni di mercato, spesso con il pretesto di mantenere la stabilità. La Banca Mondiale afferma che circa la metà degli episodi di accumulo di debito nei mercati emergenti sin dal 1970 ha coinvolto crisi finanziarie, e gli episodi associati a esse sono stati caratterizzati da una maggiore crescita del debito e un'economia stagnante. Le principali crisi degli ultimi decenni hanno evidenziato che le banche centrali non le prevengono, spesso i loro interventi hanno solo ritardato la resa dei conti, aggravando gli squilibri sottostanti, in particolare il debito pubblico. Le banche centrali usano il loro enorme potere per mascherarne l'insolvenza e aumentarne il prezzo, il che porta a un'eccessiva assunzione di rischi e a un'inflazione dei prezzi degli asset. L'espansione monetaria e la NIRP del 2020, perpetuate fino al 2022 nonostante l'impennata dell'inflazione, ne sono un chiaro esempio. Gli stati hanno beneficiato del periodo di espansione consentendo loro di far lievitare spesa pubblica e debito. Nel frattempo cittadini e piccole imprese hanno sofferto di un'inflazione elevata. Quando le banche centrali hanno infine riconosciuto il problema che avevano contribuito a creare, hanno mantenuto linee di politica accomodanti, dando priorità alla liquidità, alimentando una maggiore irresponsabilità da parte degli stati, e l'aumento dei tassi ha danneggiato le finanze delle famiglie e delle piccole imprese che in precedenza avevano subito l'esplosione dell'inflazione. Gli stati non si sono preoccupati degli aumenti dei tassi perché hanno aumentato le tasse. La Banca d'Inghilterra, ad esempio, così come la BCE, continua a tagliare i tassi e ad allentare la politica monetaria nonostante l'aumento dell'inflazione. La controtendenza degli USA non è un caso, invece, visto che mirano a riformare il sistema e stanno già mettendo in cantiere le basi di questa riforma.

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da Zerohedge

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lo-tsunami-di-insolvenze-in-germania)

La Germania è investita da un'ondata di insolvenze. Ora, nel terzo anno di una prolungata recessione, la situazione economica è più allarmante rispetto alla crisi finanziaria del 2009.

La spirale di morte delle imprese tedesche ha raggiunto proporzioni drammatiche. Secondo il Leibniz Institute for Economic Research di Halle (IWH), il secondo trimestre del 2025 ha fatto registrare il numero più alto di insolvenze tra società di persone e società di capitali degli ultimi 20 anni. Nonostante un leggero calo a giugno, la tendenza persiste: la sostanza economica della Germania si sta erodendo e, con essa, la nazione sta silenziosamente dicendo addio alla sua prosperità.

Estinzione di massa delle aziende tedesche

Solo a giugno gli economisti dell'IWH hanno contato 1.420 fallimenti aziendali, in calo del 4% rispetto a maggio, ma i confronti su base annua rivelano l'intera portata della crisi: un aumento del 23% rispetto a giugno 2024. Le cifre sono anche superiori, di oltre il 50%, rispetto alla media pre-lockdown. Particolarmente degno di nota: in stati economicamente forti come la Baviera e l'Assia, le insolvenze sono aumentate in modo sproporzionato, rispettivamente dell'80% e del 79%.

Nel complesso, nel secondo trimestre sono state registrate 4.524 insolvenze aziendali, con un aumento del 7% rispetto al primo trimestre del 2025.

Gli economisti citano non solo la recessione in corso, ma anche una correzione di mercato attesa da tempo, dopo anni di tassi di interesse bassissimi imposti dalla Banca Centrale Europea. Come afferma Steffen Müller, responsabile della ricerca sull'insolvenza presso l'IWH: “Per molti anni i tassi di interesse estremamente bassi hanno impedito i fallimenti e, durante la pandemia, gli aiuti di Stato hanno mantenuto in vita aziende già deboli”. Ora il mercato sta reclamando il suo potere di pulizia.

Evitare l'analisi della causa principale

Ma questa rottura strutturale si scontra con un vuoto nella politica economica.

Sebbene l'analisi dell'IWH eviti di affrontare le debolezze strutturali più profonde e i danni politici autoinflitti, questi rimangono i fattori decisivi alla base dell'isolamento economico della Germania. Gli elevati costi energetici, l'eccessiva regolamentazione e la pressione fiscale – per gli standard internazionali – stanno spingendo le aziende al fallimento o alla fuga all'estero. I lavoratori ne stanno ora risentendo sempre di più.

Secondo la società di consulenza Ernst & Young, nel 2025 saranno probabilmente tagliati oltre 100.000 posti di lavoro, soprattutto nel settore industriale, la principale vittima della crisi energetica e normativa. Dal periodo pre-COVID l'industria tedesca ha perso circa il 10% del suo volume di produzione. Considerato isolatamente, il settore è finito più in una depressione che in una recessione. Nelle condizioni attuali, un ritorno a un percorso di crescita sostenibile è improbabile.

Anche il settore edile, duramente colpito, sta soffrendo. Un tempo elemento stabilizzante nel 2020-21, l'attività edilizia è crollata sin dal 2022. La produzione edilizia reale è diminuita del 4% nel 2024, con un ulteriore calo previsto del 2,5-3% per il 2025. Nel complesso il volume reale delle costruzioni nel 2025 sarà inferiore del 10-12% rispetto ai livelli del 2019.

False speranze di salvataggio

Il governo tedesco prevede un piano di stimolo economico da €847 miliardi, finanziato tramite debito, nell'arco di quattro anni, destinato principalmente al potenziamento delle infrastrutture e dell'apparato militare. Tuttavia la maggior parte dei fondi sarà probabilmente destinata a colmare le lacune del sistema previdenziale tedesco, ormai in piena emorragia.

Solo nel 2025 si prevede un deficit previdenziale di almeno €140 miliardi. Il governo federale deve colmare questa lacuna per evitare un aumento vertiginoso dei costi secondari. In caso contrario gli ambiziosi piani di investimento dell'amministrazione Merz crolleranno.

La Germania è diventata un caso socioeconomico problematico e i suoi leader si aggrappano all'ormai sorpassato copione keynesiano. Si prevede che la spesa pubblica, finanziata attraverso il debito e sostenuta dalla soppressione dei tassi d'interesse da parte della BCE, darà una spinta all'economia.

Ma questo non accadrà. Solo il mercato può allocare in modo efficiente il capitale scarso verso usi produttivi che creino prosperità. Berlino ancora deve comprendere questa realtà.

Il recente accordo commerciale tra Stati Uniti e Unione Europea costerà alla Germania circa €6,5 miliardi in dazi solo nel primo anno, ma ben più dannoso sarà l'esodo delle aziende che trasferiscono le proprie attività negli Stati Uniti per evitare i dazi, a meno che il sistema tariffario tedesco non cambi.

L'ondata di debiti del governo Merz potrebbe ritardare brevemente l'ondata di insolvenze inondando i mercati di capitale artificiale, ma questo non farà che rinviare l'inevitabile resa dei conti: un'epurazione delle aziende zombi che prosperavano grazie al credito a basso costo o ai sussidi del Green Deal europeo.

Stato ipertrofico, ideologia verde

A poche settimane dall'insediamento di Friedrich Merz come cancelliere, una cosa è chiara: non si tornerà a una politica economica basata sul mercato. Merz si è rivelato un sostenitore del big government, dell'interventismo e dell'ortodossia della trasformazione verde.

La Germania detiene ancora il peso politico necessario per far fallire il programma di trasformazione di Bruxelles e forzare un ritorno alla razionalità economica. Tuttavia, finora, la rapida deindustrializzazione del Paese e la prolungata recessione non hanno innescato una rivalutazione critica del suo percorso politico.

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

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AI is not so much a tool that everyone uses in more or less the same way, but a mirror in which we see our own reflection–if we care to look.

Attention has been riveted on what AI can do for the three years since the unveiling of ChatGPT, but very little attention has been paid to what the human user is bringing to the exchange.

If we pay close attention to what the human brings to the exchange, we find that AI is not so much a tool that everyone uses in more or less the same way, but a mirror in which we see our own reflection–if we care to look, and we might not, for what AI reflects may well be troubling.

What we see in the AI mirror reflects the entirety of our knowledge, our emotional state and our yearnings.

Those who understand generative AI is nothing more than “auto-complete on steroids” (thank you, Simon), a probability-based program, may well be impressed with the illusion of understanding it creates via its mastery of natural language and human-written texts, but it’s understood as a magic trick, not actual intelligence or caring.

In other words, to seek friendship in AI demands suspending our awareness that it’s been programmed to create a near-perfect illusion of intelligence and caring. As I noted earlier this week, this is the exact same mechanism the con artist uses to gain the trust and emotional bonding of their target (mark).

What we seek from AI reflects our economic sphere and our goals–what we call “work”–but it also reflects the entirety of our emotional state–unresolved conflicts, dissatisfaction with ourselves and life, alienation, loneliness, ennui, and so on, and our intellectual state.

Those obsessed with using AI to improve their “work flows” might see, if they chose to look carefully, an over-scheduled way of life that’s less about accomplishment–what we tell ourselves–and more about a hamster-wheel of BS work, symbolic value and signaling to others and ourselves: we’re busy, so we’re valuable.

Those seeking a wise friend, counselor or romantic partner in AI are reflecting a profound hollowness in their human relationships, and a set of expectations that are unrealistic and lacking in introspection.

Those seeking intellectual stimulation will find wormholes into the entirety of human knowledge, for what’s difficult for humans–seeking and applying patterns and connections to complex realms–AI does easily, and so we’re astonished and enamored by its facility with complex ideas.

The more astute the human’s queries and prompts, the deeper the AI’s response, for the AI mirrors the human user’s knowledge and state of mind.

So the student who knows virtually nothing about hermeneutics–the art of interpreting texts, symbols, images, film, etc.–might ask for an explanation that summarizes the basic mechanisms of hermeneutics.

Someone with deep knowledge of philosophy and hermeneutics will ask far more specific and more analytically acute questions, for example, prompting AI to compare and contrast Marxist hermeneutics and postmodern hermeneutics. The AI’s response may well be a word salad, but because the human has a deep understanding of the field, they may discern something in the AI’s response that they find insightful, for it triggered a new connection in their own mind.

This is important to understand: the AI did not generate the insight, though the human reckons it did because the phrase struck the human as insightful. The insight arose in the human mind due to its deep knowledge of the field. The student simply trying to complete a college paper might see the exact same phrase and find it of little relevance or value.

To an objective observer, it may well be a word salad, meaning that the appearance of coherence wasn’t real, it was generated by the human with deep knowledge of the field, who automatically skipped over the inconsequential bits and pieced together the bits that were only meaningful because of their own expertise.

What matters isn’t what AI auto-completes; what matters is our interpretation of the AI output, what we read into it, and what it sparks in our own mind. (This is the hermeneutics of interacting with AI.)

This explains why the few people I personally know who have taken lengthy, nuanced dives into AI and found real value are in their 50s, meaning that they have a deep well of lived experience and a broad awareness of many fields. They have the knowledge to make sense of whatever AI spits out on a deeper level of interpretation that the neophyte or scattered student.

In other words, the magic isn’t in what AI spits out; the magic is in what we piece together in our own minds from what AI generated.

As many are coming to grasp, this is equally true in the emotional realm. To an individual with an identity and sense of self that comes from within, that isn’t dependent on status or what others think or value, the idea of engaging a computer programmed to slather us with flattery is not just unappealing, it’s disturbing because it’s so obviously the same mechanism used by con artists.

To the secure individual, the first question that arises when AI heaps on the praise and artifice of caring is: what’s the con?

What the emotionally needy individual sees as empathy and affirmation–because this is what they lack within themselves and therefore what they crave–the emotionally secure individual sees as fake, inauthentic and potentially manipulative, a reflection not just of neediness but of a narcissism that reflects a culture of unrealistic expectations and narcissistic involution.

Read the Whole Article

The post AI Is a Mirror in Which We See Our Own Reflection appeared first on LewRockwell.

There’s no better example of how little faith Americans have that government officials will tell the truth than the public’s blasé reaction to UFO announcements.  In the last ten years, The New York Times has run stories about secret Pentagon programs tasked with retrieving alien craft.  Members of Congress have held hearings on “mysterious orbs” and invited government witnesses to testify about black budget projects supposedly reverse-engineering alien technology.  Secretary of State Rubio and director of National Intelligence Gabbard have both suggested that the UFO issue is serious.  Yet eight billion people around the world collectively shrug.

Can you imagine what the public reaction would have been like had national newspapers and prominent officials released similar details in the 1950s?  With the 1947 Roswell Incident still fresh in Americans’ minds, government confirmation of UFOs would have been the most important story in the world.  Every article written and television report broadcast would have been framed around the alien/UFO phenomenon.

For eighty years, UFO-hunters have been fighting for government declassifications and official disclosure of alien contact.  Now that videos of strange sightings have been released and congressional hearings have been convened to investigate the matter, Americans don’t seem to care.  Representatives Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna have said explicitly that extraterrestrial visitors are real, and their statements disappear in a blizzard of news stories discussing the “Aryan micro-aggressions” of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans.

Nobody believes what government officials say.  Nobody believes what journalists say.  In our world today, fantastic stories come and go, and nobody knows if they’re real.

CIA director William Casey reportedly told other principals gathered in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in early 1981, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”  Whether Casey was being frighteningly blunt or darkly humorous,  I don’t know.  Yet we certainly know that the CIA and FBI have been running mass propaganda programs on the American people for as long as either agency has existed.

What military schools now teach as examples of “hybrid” or “information warfare” has long been part of the U.S. government’s arsenal of psychological weapons used against American citizens.  I wish this fact were more shocking to people.  Information warfare is just as effective and deadly as conventional warfare.

As bad as Allied losses were at Normandy, they would have been much worse had Eisenhower and Patton not tricked Hitler into concentrating his forces away from the locus of the invasion.  All of the so-called “color revolutions” of the last fifteen years in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East relied heavily upon anonymous (and likely espionage agency–created) social media accounts to inflame tensions, sow chaos, and encourage rioting.  The Russia Collusion Hoax and the unbridled COVID hysteria (during which governments rushed to close schools and businesses and censor online speech before basic facts could even be established) are textbook examples of information warfare that upended entire societies without ever firing a shot.

When we acknowledge that government institutions have knowingly and willfully targeted the American people with disinformation campaigns meant to achieve strategic objectives, we are acknowledging that these institutions have made war against us exactly as military planners would wage war against foreign enemies.  That is a sobering, terrifying, and unforgivable betrayal of the U.S. Constitution.

Surely the federal government’s information war against the American people is just as newsworthy as the possibility of extraterrestrial or intra-dimensional visitors.  Noticeably, however, there are even fewer stories written about the government’s mass psychological operations against citizens than there are stories written about UFOs.  That’s pretty revealing.  The New York Times would rather hype speculation about little green men than document how federal agencies regularly lie to and manipulate the American people.

Why do you think that is?  It is because The Times and other prominent news publications are well aware that they have been willing weapons in this decades-long information war against citizens.  The government can’t psychologically manipulate the masses without controlling mass communication.  Likewise, instruments of mass communication can’t effectively disseminate disinformation if the people who are meant to be manipulated recognize those instruments as weapons for spreading colossal lies.

When President Trump first began excoriating reporters for publishing “fake news,” the Dan Rathers and Jim Acostas of the propaganda press huffed and puffed, claiming that Trump’s exercise of his First Amendment right to free speech somehow jeopardized Americans’ First Amendment right to a free press.  Coming from the mouths of known liars, the journalistic Establishment’s choreographed umbrage was hilarious.  The prodigious manufacturers of fake news had long advertised their offal-laden sausages as fine cuts of meat.  And Trump had no problem telling the American people that the most famous names in news sold eyeball- and intestine-filled slop.

But it was not Trump’s insults that the corporate news media really feared.  After all, lame-duck President Obama had used the “fake news” pejorative repeatedly before leaving office in an effort to blame Hillary’s election loss on random social media accounts supposedly spreading “Russian disinformation.”  (Appallingly, Obama was pushing Russia Collusion Hoax disinformation while blaming disinformation for Trump’s victory.)  Even the propaganda press picked up Obama’s baton and published numerous stories in late 2016 claiming that an epidemic of “fake news” got Trump elected.

So the purveyors of fake news had no problem disparaging other news publications as “fake.”  They only started worrying when they belatedly realized that Trump’s belittling of their profession had shattered their decades-long spell over the minds of the American people.  Frauds such as Dan Rather and Jim Acosta called Trump a liar.  Trump called them liars.  And the American people believed Trump more than the pudgy blood sausages of fake news.

Trust in government institutions and newsrooms has been falling for decades.  The Russia Collusion Hoax, the COVID Reign of Terror, and the outrageous lawfare campaigns against conservative politicians and voters have now destroyed public trust in Establishment institutions for the foreseeable future.

Where do we go from here?  When authorities no longer have the trust of the people, they survive only by making amends for past transgressions or adopting even more overt forms of coercion.  In the former case, government transparency, the impartial application of the law, and respect for public dissent help to renew the social contract between citizens and their government.  In the latter case, appeals to expertise, discriminatory criminal enforcement, and rank censorship become hammers beating citizens into submission.

The United Kingdom has chosen coercion.  Law enforcement agencies in the U.K. spend more resources policing public debate on social media platforms than they do curbing illegal immigration or protecting children from rape gangs.  Citizens who express unapproved thoughts that contradict official government policies put themselves in legal jeopardy.  U.K. health authorities continue to defend their COVID totalitarianism as a reasonable emergency response backed by “scientific” expertise.  In the U.K., protections for free speech, dissent, and freedom of conscience are dead.

The Brits will surely reap what they now sow.  They will discover how many citizens are willing to “trust the experts” when “net zero” energy rationing puts lives and livelihoods in danger.  They will learn how many capable warriors are willing to fight and die in future wars for a country that treats illegal aliens better than patriotic citizens.  They will rediscover that the criminalization of public debate leaves silenced citizens no alternative to rebellion.

In the United States, we have a small window to avoid Britain’s fate.  While President Trump is keeping the corporate news media’s propagandists and Silicon Valley’s censors at bay, Americans have one final chance to defend free speech from the contemptible Deep State.  If we fail, everything will soon resemble a UFO.  Nobody will know what’s fake or real…or even care.

This article was originally published on American Thinker.

The post Nobody Knows What’s Real appeared first on LewRockwell.

Peter recently returned to the Mining Network for an interview with Peter Gadsdon. In this interview the duo covers executive overreach, unreliable government jobs data, a weakening dollar, and why persistent inflation will keep the Federal Reserve from cutting rates. Peter ties all of these threads to a larger theme — loss of confidence in fiat money and the growing logic for holding sound money.

He opens by calling out a recent deal struck by President Trump and Nvidia that oversteps constitutional authority and functions like an export tax. Peter sees it as another example of presidential power expanding at the expense of constitutional limits and ordinary commerce:

Trump doesn’t have the authority to do this. And also, it amounts to an export tax, which is completely unconstitutional because the Constitution doesn’t even give the government the power to tax exports. They can tax imports, but those are supposed to originate in the House of Representatives, not with the White House. So Trump is making a mockery of the Constitution. He is dramatically expanding the power of the government, particularly the presidency.

He follows that up by questioning the motives behind a recent politically-motivated firing and connects it to what he sees as a systematic problem with jobs numbers. Peter thinks the administration has been misreading — and taking credit for — data that is often revised substantially after the fact:

The crazy part about the fact that he fired her was why. He didn’t fire her because all six of the last jobs numbers have been wrong, right, because everyone was revised way down. Meanwhile, every time one of these jobs reports came out better than expected, Trump was taking credit, even though we now know that every single jobs report that he took credit for wasn’t a beat, but it was a miss. In fact, the last two reports were revised down by the most in 50 years. So the job creation record so far on Trump’s watch has been dismal.

From domestic statistics he moves to international consequences. Peter warns that if the United States keeps treating its fiscal position as flexible — relying on inflation to erode real debt burdens — foreign holders of dollars and government debt will lose faith and reduce their holdings. He expects this to accelerate a shift away from the dollar and into hard assets:

Well, I mean, I think there’s a loss of confidence in the dollar and in the fiscal integrity of the United States. I think it should be clear to our creditors that we’re never going to get our house in order, that we’re going to inflate away any debt obligations that they’re foolish enough to hold onto. So I think the de-dollarization trend is going to continue and accelerate. I think central banks will keep the investing of dollars and moving more and more of their reserves into gold. I think the world will continue to wean itself off of the US dollar for global payments and transactions.

He also explains why attempts to lower the government’s interest burden by leaning on short-term borrowing are dangerous. Borrowing at the short end only helps if long-term yields cooperate; if they rise, the strategy can leave the country exposed to refinancing risk and sudden increases in interest costs:

The US would only save that money if they do all the borrowing at the very short end of the curve. Because if I’m right and the Fed cuts rates and the yield on long-term bonds goes up, that doesn’t help the government. Right? So the only way the government would save money would be to keep borrowing real short. But that is in a very risky position to put the country in.

Finally, Peter turns to gold markets and the distinction between paper claims and physical metal. He warns that much of the activity in gold is speculative — futures are rolled rather than delivered — but a real run for physical metal could expose the limits of that paper market and create a squeeze. That, in his view, is precisely the kind of event that reveals the value of holding real, deliverable assets rather than promises:

But I do believe that eventually there could be a run on the futures markets because normally people are buying gold futures. They don’t need the gold and they don’t want the gold. They’re just trying to bet on the direction of the gold. They’re happy to roll over the contract to the next month as the contracts mature because they don’t actually need the gold. … Maybe you get the COMEX going bankrupt if the COMEX stands behind all these commitments that the shorts have made.

This article was originally published on SchiffGold.com.

The post Mining Network: Borrowing Short Puts the Country at Risk appeared first on LewRockwell.

Today is the 90th birthday of a great man—my friend, Ron Paul.

During my 30 years in the U.S. House, I served with almost 1500 other members. To me, Ron Paul was the best.

He was a man of great courage and conviction. He never wavered. Every speech he made, every vote he cast, was based on his core beliefs in freedom, liberty and peace.

For many years, I had hanging on a wall in my Knoxville office a guote I learned from Bill Kauffman, the great columnist and author. It is from a 1930 novel called “The Lions Den” by Janet Ayer Fairbank about a fictional Congressman named Zimmer.

“No matter how the espousal of a lost cause might hurt his prestige in the House, Zimmer never hesitated to identify himself with it if it seemed to him to be right. He knew only two ways: the right one and the wrong, and if he made a mistake, it was never one of honor. He voted as he believed he should, and although sometimes his voice was raised alone on one side of a question, it was never stilled.”

Those words fit Ron Paul more closely than any other member with whom I served.

Many on the far Left seem to be filled with so much pride and arrogance that they simply cannot believe that anyone could oppose what they want. They are often very hateful and very quick to accuse people on the Right of hate. Yet this is the epitome of the pot calling the kettle black.

Ron Paul was always kind even to people who were sometimes very rude to him. He was not a shouter. He simply quietly and persistently expressed his philosophy and in the process inspired millions.

Once, when he was running for President, I had the fun of introducing him to the students at George Washington University where I went to law school. More than 6,000 turned out to hear this man with whom they probably thought they disagreed on practically everything.

Boy, were they shocked. Instead of the mean, hateful right-wing kook they had been brainwashed to expect, they found a candidate who was kind and thoughtful and who very intelligently answered every question and every challenge.

Ron served three different stints in Congress, all in the House. He was there from 1976 to 1977, 1979 to 1985, and finally from 1997 to 2013. I was there for his 16-year stay.

Our voting records were almost identical, usually in the minority and often in a very small minority. We usually voted 500 to 600 times a year, or sometimes even more, so there probably would have been 9,000 to 10,000 floor votes during his 16 years in the House.

We both voted against going war in Iraq, against the Wall Street bailout, and against creating the Department of Homeland Security. We voted to bring the troops home from Afghanistan many years before the disastrous pullout. We voted to audit the Federal Reserve, and we certainly did not vote to give the Pentagon, the CIA, the UN, the Israel Lobby, and Big Government contractors everything they wanted.

I got to work with Ron when he was still in his prime. Now, naturally and normally, age has taken its toll. He is not as strong in body or voice as he was when we served together.

But he is still on the frontlines every day fighting for liberty and freedom through his Liberty Report, his columns, and especially the work of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. I am proud that I was there for the founding of this Institute and that I still serve on its Advisory Board.

I hope that Ron Paul has many more birthdays and that he keeps fighting his good fight for many years to come.

The post Tribute to Ron Paul appeared first on LewRockwell.

Unless academic achievement in one’s youth is followed by lifelong habits of study and inquiry, it may lull a man into grossly overestimating his understanding of the world.

As far as I know, history’s worst example of this was Nevil Maskelyne, the English Astronomer Royal from 1765 to 1811. A key member of the Board of Longitude during a period when Britain was desperately trying to discover a way to calculate longitude at sea, he was so proud of his knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that he steadfastly refused to acknowledge that John Harrison’s marine chronometer offered a simple, mechanical solution to the problem.

For years, Maskelyne used his influence to prevent Harrison’s chronometer from being recognized as the obvious solution that could prevent British vessels from getting lost at sea and shipwrecked because the navigator couldn’t be sure of his longitude. It was only when Harrison got an audience with King George III—who pronounced “By Jove, Harrison, you’ve been wronged!”—that he was recognized for his ingenious and useful invention.

Nevil Maskelyne was a talented astronomer and mathematician, but when it came to the practical business of easily calculating longitude at sea, he was dead wrong, and his academic pride hindered him from acknowledging it. In addition to terribly wronging John Harrison, Maskelyne consigned innumerable sailors to misery and even death at sea by delaying the widespread adoption Harrison’s chronometer as standard equipment on British vessels.

I was reminded of Maskelyne this morning when I read Senator Bill Cassidy’s August 15 essay in Washington Examiner, Trump’s vaccine legacy is America’s strategic shield.

Senator Cassidy earned his Doctor of Medicine degree from Louisiana State University in 1983 and then worked as a full-time physician and liver specialist for the LSU Earl K. Long Hospital in Baton Rouge for two decades before going into politics in 2006.

His education and his experience in medicine have apparently lulled him into overestimating his understanding of the world. It seems to me that his essay in the Washington Examiner surpasses a stopped clock in the thoroughness of its inaccuracies and falsehoods.

He opens by parroting cartoonish propaganda about measles, and then—in what appears to be an obsequious attempt to flatter President Trump’s ego—proclaims Operation Warp Speed to be one of the greatest triumphs in history.

After making this grandiose and delusional assertion, he makes the following pronouncement:

In the meantime, COVID-19 taught adversaries, such as the Chinese Communist Party, how to weaponize pandemics. The playbook is obvious: design a virus, secretly develop a vaccine, immunize your own forces, and unleash the pathogen abroad. Within weeks, an unprepared America could be militarily and economically incapacitated. The only defense is a rapid-response vaccine platform that can pivot instantly to meet the threat. That is what mRNA offers: mRNA vaccines take less time to manufacture than other platforms. That is why it is confounding that some in the administration now want to undermine the president’s historic success. Abandoning mRNA vaccines now would be like dismantling space-based infrared missile satellites before an air attack.

It’s hard for me to believe that Senator Cassidy has remained ignorant of the mountains of evidence that the scheme he describes was, in fact, perpetrated by American and Chinese collaborators. Right now he should be asking the following questions:

1). Given that he regards the Chinese Communist Party and military as adversaries of the United States, why did the U.S. NIH approve sharing cutting edge American biotechnology with the Wuhan Institute of Virology between the years 2014 and 2020?

2). Why did the NIAID approve and even provide funding for Professor Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill and Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance to work directly with WIV virologist Shi Zhengli to make SARS-like bat coronaviruses infectious to humans?

3). Why did Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, patent a genetic sequence in 2016 that was later found to match perfectly a 19-nucleotide genetic sequence encompassing the furin cleavage site of SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19?

4). Why did Moderna provide Ralph Baric with its mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidate to perform “challenge studies” a few weeks before—according to the official U.S. government timeline of events—SARS-CoV-2 was officially discovered in China?

On the slim chance that Senator Cassidy has somehow remained completely ignorant of this greatest organized crime in history, I will attempt to edify him by publishing here the relevant excerpts from our new book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality.

If any of our readers have contact with a member of the Senator’s staff, please share this post with him.

Chapter 22: A New Illness for a New Vaccine Era

In 1965, the British virologist David Arthur John Tyrrell—director of the Common Cold Unit—discovered a new virus. Under an electron micro- scope, the nucleocapsid appeared to be garlanded with a crownlike structure. As he related in his book Cold Wars: The Fight Against the Common Cold:

We looked more closely at the appearance of the new viruses and noticed that they had a kind of halo surrounding them. Recourse to a dictionary produced the Latin equivalent, corona, and so the name coronavirus was born.

As the title of his book indicates, Tyrrell regarded coronaviruses as pathogenic insofar as they caused the common cold—the most common infectious disease in humans. Reviewing the historical chronicles of infectious disease, it seemed that the deadly respiratory viral pandemics documented in the past were more likely caused by influenza viruses than coronaviruses.

However, about twenty years after Tyrrell first described human coronaviruses, a gifted and industrious microbiologist named Ralph Baric began obsessively studying coronaviruses and looking for additional ways in which they could cause disease, especially by creating recombinant variants of a coronaviruses—a process at which he became increasingly adept with years of practice.

Baric pursued this line of inquiry between 1985 and 2002. In April 2002, he and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina filed a patent application for their Methods for Producing Recombinant Coronavirus. The contents of the patent application revealed that he had come a long way in discovering how to manipulate coronaviruses in his lab. The purpose of his work, he claimed, was to create recombinant coronaviruses in order to develop vaccines against them.

About seven months after Baric et al. filed their patent application, the first apparent cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) were reported in Foshan, Guangdong China. In February 2003, several people, including an American businessman, staying in a Hong Kong hotel came down with the syndrome.

The businessman then traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam, where he was hospitalized. Dr. Carlo Urbani, a WHO scientist in Hanoi, visited the patient and suspected he was suffering from a novel disease. Urbani himself contracted the disease and died on March 29, 2003, in Bangkok. On April 1, 2003, the WHO announced:

A new pathogen—a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans, is the cause of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The speed at which this virus was identified is the result of the close international collaboration of 13 laboratories from 10 countries.

Between November 2002 and July 2003, SARS is estimated to have infected over 8,000 people from thirty countries and territories, and to have caused at least 774 deaths worldwide.

Looking back, it strikes us as a remarkable coincidence that “a new pathogen—a member of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans”—emerged just seven months after Ralph Baric et al. filed their patent application for Methods for Producing Recombinant Coronavirus.

Quickly this “new pathogen” became all the rage in pandemic planning circles, and a flood of NIH and private foundation money was made available to coronaviruses researchers like Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill.

In June 2005, Professor Baric gave a talk titled “Synthetic Coronaviruses. Biohacking: Biological Warfare Enabling Technologies” at a DARPA/ MITRE-sponsored event in Washington DC.

After the 2009 “Swine Flu Pandemic” proved to be a dud, many virologists began to wonder if another pandemic influenza as virulent as the 1918 Spanish Flu would indeed emerge in their lifetimes. A few years after influenza researchers Kawaoka and Fouchier made a splash by creating an H5N1 bird flu virus capable of respiratory transmission among ferrets, Baric and a British zoologist named Peter Daszak—President of EcoHealth Alliance—teamed up to obtain a massive, multi-year NIH grant bonanza to study coronaviruses that purportedly had the potential to emerge from bats into humans.

Previously a wildlife conservation organization, EcoHealth under Daszak’s leadership rebranded itself as an institution for studying emerging infectious disease threats in areas such as southern China. EcoHealth claimed that expanding human development is encroaching on tropical forest habitats of animal species that could be viral reservoirs. Its goal was to catalog these viruses and predict which ones are most likely to jump species and infect humans.

Here it’s worth noting that even virologists who were instrumental in concealing the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2 have expressed profound skepticism about Daszak’s prediction concept. As Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, and Kristian G. Andersen put it in a 2018 comment in Nature:

Determining which of more than 1.6 million animal viruses are capable of replicating in humans and transmitting between them would require many decades’ worth of laboratory work in cell cul- tures and animals. Even if researchers managed to link each virus genome sequence to substantial experimental data, all sorts of other factors determine whether a virus jumps species and emerges in a human population, such as the distribution and density of animal hosts. Influenza viruses have circulated in horses since the 1950s and in dogs since the early 2000s, for instance. These viruses have not emerged in human populations, and perhaps never will—for unknown reasons.

Nevertheless, because of the 2002 SARS outbreak in China, Daszak and Baric were able to sell their research project to various U.S. federal agencies, including the NIAID, USAID, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, where alleged anthrax serial killer Bruce Ivins had worked.

The paper trail of Baric and Daszak’s work to modify bat coronaviruses in the lab to make them infectious to humans is so vast that only a U.S. Congressman or New York Times reporter could fail to see it.

In 2013, Daszak and his collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a paper (in Nature) titled “Isolation and Characterization of a Bat SARS-like Coronavirus That Uses the ACE2 Receptor.” As they put it, for the first time in history, they’d found two wild bat coronaviruses that would bind to the human ACE2 receptor. These two viruses were named,

1. Bat SL-CoV-WIV1

2. SHCOI4

Because these two virus species could (Daszak claimed) bind to human ACE2 receptors, they were (Daszak further claimed) of great interest to virologists who are in the business of anticipating which viruses could, in theory, mutate and evolve to infect and become transmissible among humans. Daszak’s 2013 paper with his WIV colleagues Xing-Ye Ge and Zheng-Li Shi attracted much attention in virology circles.

The following year, Daszak and Baric obtained multiyear NIH funding for a research project under the grant title “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” Continuing their work with Xing-Ye Ge and Zheng-Li Shi, Professor Baric performed gain-of-function work on the bat viruses SL-CoV WIV1 and SHCO15. They then published two papers in 2015 and 2016:

1. “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence” (published in Nature Medicine).
2. “SARS-like WIV1-CoV Poised for Human Emergence” (published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS).

In the first paper, Baric and colleagues describe how they created a “chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse- adapted SARS-CoV backbone” and named it SHC014-MA15. In the second paper, Baric and colleagues describe how they “also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone” and named it WIV1-MA15. Regarding their first chimera (SHCOI4-MA15), Baric et al. made the bold claim that it

. . . can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate effi- ciently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.

These papers are just two pieces in the mountain of documentary evidence that SARS-CoV-2—the causative agent of COVID-19—was made in a laboratory by Ralph Baric and his Wuhan Institute of Virology colleagues.

Another conspicuous document is Daszak’s March 24, 2018, proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), titled “Project DEFUSE: Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses,” seeking funding of $14,209,245. The reviewers at DARPA turned down the request because it proposed to do dangerous gain-of-function work on bat coronaviruses. Especially alarming was the proposal’s statement:

We will analyze all SARS-CoV gene sequences for . . . the presence of potential furin cleavage sites. SARS-CoV with mismatches in proteolytic cleavage sites can be activated by exogenous tryp- sin or cathepsin L. Where clear mismatches occur, we will intro- duce appropriate human specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cell and HAE cultures.

Two years later, when SARS-CoV-2—the causative agent of COVID- 19—emerged, virologists all over the world marveled that its genome contained a sequence for a furin cleavage site. This is the component of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that enables the virus to dock onto human lung epithelial cells, thereby initiating the viral replication process. It is the key feature of SARS-CoV-2 that made it infectious to humans.

One of the silliest lies told by Dr. Anthony Fauci has been his insistence that NIAID did not approve gain-of-function work by EcoHealth. Fauci has repeatedly asserted this in a loud and vexed tone, as though he is outraged by the mere proposition. And yet, Ralph Baric and his colleagues—including Zhengli-Li Shi at the WIV—plainly state in their 2015 paper,

These studies were initiated before the US Government Deliberative Process Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS and SARS Viruses. (phe.gov/ s3/dualuse/Documents/gain-of-function.pdf). This paper has been reviewed by the funding agency, the NIH. Continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.

The official, stated reason for creating SARS-like bat coronaviruses in a lab was to create countermeasures against them to protect humanity if such viruses were ever to evolve naturally to emerge in the wild. At a 2015 workshop hosted by the National Academies of Science, Daszak stated,

Until an infectious disease crisis is very real, present, and at an emer- gency threshold, it is often largely ignored. To sustain the funding base beyond the crisis, we need to increase public understanding of the need for MCMs [Medical Countermeasures] such as a pan- influenza or pan-coronavirus vaccine. A key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues. Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of process.

In other words, in addition to being a beneficiary of the federal grant gravy train, Daszak also positioned himself to be an investment consultant in vaccine development for coronaviruses.

During the years 2016– 2019, multiple players in the bio-pharmaceutical complex prepared for the emergence or the lab release of a novel coronavirus. They correctly perceived that the opportunity to make a killing was in the offing.

Read the Whole Article

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On August 15, the presidential delegations of the Russian Federation and the United States met in Anchorage, Alaska. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump met in person for the first time since 2019, discussing various topics of mutual interest to both countries, especially regarding the future of the ongoing hostilities in Ukraine. The meeting was quite positive, despite frustrating the expectations of optimistic analysts who naively hoped the event would end with a ceasefire agreement. Ultimately, the meeting served as a further step in the search for a diplomatic resolution to the current crisis and advanced the restoration of Russian-American ties.

The meeting brought together, in addition to the presidents, several key figures from both countries. On the Russian side, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov, and the Russian President’s economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev participated. On the American side, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe attended. The summit was organized with joint meetings between the delegations, as well as time for private conversations between the presidents.

Expectations for the meeting were high. Naturally, the US government used the event to promote Donald Trump’s image as a “peacemaker.” Therefore, optimistic analysts hoped the summit would end with some kind of peace protocol or at least a ceasefire agreement signed. However, realistically, this was impossible, considering the material circumstances of the conflict. Currently, there are still Ukrainian troops on Russian constitutional territory. It is impossible for Russia to tolerate foreign occupation of any part of its sovereign territory, which is why talks about peace or ceasefire under the current military circumstances seem unrealistic.

However, the summit was extremely positive in restoring bilateral relations between the two countries and thus reducing global tensions. More than that, the event served as an opportunity for Putin to directly explain to Trump the fundamental reasons for the conflict. The American president appears to have changed his mind on the ceasefire issue.

Speaking to the press after the meeting, Trump stated that the original causes of the conflict must be resolved, otherwise any truce will be fragile and temporary. Both leaders appear to have finally reached a common understanding that the real problems behind the hostilities must be eliminated, including mutual security guarantees for Ukraine and Russia.

Putin stated that if Trump were president in 2022, perhaps the special military operation would not have been launched. This is an important point for understanding the crisis. Three years ago, the US stance with Biden and the Democrats was one of absolute hostility against Russia. Trump, on the other hand, appears more open to dialogue and diplomatic cooperation, listening to Russian concerns and trying to reach a common agreement. Had this been done earlier, perhaps the current conflict would not have occurred.

Unfortunately, the future of the war does not depend solely on the US. The EU currently maintains the same stance as the Democrats, fomenting war at all costs. Putin even expressed concern that European countries will attempt to boycott the current negotiations between Moscow and Washington.

Trump, for his part, stated that he has an excellent relationship with Putin and that he considers the Russian president a friend, which is why he believes in a peaceful solution. Furthermore, both leaders are now considering holding a new round of talks, with Putin extending a public invitation in English to Trump to come to Moscow. The presidents agreed that dialogue will soon be needed to overcome confrontation in bilateral relations.

The meeting served to address several other topics of common interest, in addition to Ukraine, such as trade, energy, technology, and space, as well as the importance of Russia-US interaction in the Arctic. The Russian ambassador to the US stated that a project to restore direct flights between Russia and the US has been established, and technical discussions are now underway on how to implement the plan.

Interestingly, the meeting in Alaska—a border region between the two countries that once belonged to Russia— served to demonstrate that Russia and the US are neighbors with a history of cooperation and friendship longer than the recent decades of hostility.

In the end, the meeting was much more about restoring Russian-American ties than about resolving the Ukrainian conflict. Ukraine was a key point in the talks, but the summit had a greater value: reestablishing direct, high-level dialogue between the world’s two leading nuclear powers.

The event made the world safer by making it possible for rival powers to discuss their problems cordially, without confrontation, and with a view to pursuing common strategic interests. Unlike the EU countries, which insist on the futile attempt to “isolate and humiliate” Russia, Trump’s US deals with Moscow rationally and diplomatically.

Inevitably, improved ties between Russia and the US raise hopes for a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. The war began as NATO’s proxy aggression against Russia. Historically, the US has led NATO, so this direct dialogue allows for a de-escalation of the global tensions behind the Ukrainian conflict.

Unfortunately, the current trend is for the EU to continue funding the war regardless of the US stance. And the Zelensky regime itself is likely to fight with all its remaining forces to prevent the country’s corrupt, neo-Nazi elite from being removed from power. However, NATO’s leading power no longer seems interested in pursuing the madness of confronting Russia.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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Was Jesus really a “faithful Jew?” Asserting as much has become a common rhetorical ploy of those—such as Cardinal Dolan and Professor Robert P. George—who wish to exaggerate the continuity between Judaism and Christianity. Like all effective rhetorical ploys, it contains a measure of truth, yet it neglects important distinctions, generating confusion rather than clarity.

In fact, although Jesus was an ethnic Jew initiated into the Mosaic covenant (Luke 2:21), and blameless and just in every regard, He was not a “faithful Jew” in the contemporary religious sense, as the phrase misleadingly implies. To contend otherwise is to do a disservice to Judaism and Christianity by obscuring their respective theological presuppositions and commitments. Worse still, the suggestion that Jesus was a “faithful Jew” subtly cultivates the error that Judaism and Christianity are essentially similar, discouraging evangelization.

Undoubtedly, Jesus was—is!—a Jew according to the flesh, as He is a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by way of Judah and, significantly, David (Matthew 1:1-16, Romans 1:3). Indeed, He is in some respects the descendant of the patriarchs: the foretold Seed prophesied to die and rise, crushing the serpent’s head, ushering in universal blessing, and receiving an everlasting kingdom comprehending all men (Galatians 3:16). Thus did our Lord offer Himself to the children of Israel: as the Promised One about whom the Law and the Prophets speak, the Christ, the Son of God (Matthew 13:16-16, Luke 4:16-21, John 5:39).

And while He was born under the Mosaic dispensation (Galatians 4:4), and while He respected its regulations (Matthew 5:17), He nevertheless exhibited a unique relationship to the Law, treating it with a sovereign mastery that startled His audience (Mark 7:19). We might say that He handled the Law not as a lawyer but as a legislator (Matthew 7:28-29). He never disobeyed the Law, surely; yet He elucidated, elevated, and perfected it.

Now this exposes a critical problem with the notion that Jesus was a “faithful Jew.” To be a “faithful Jew” at present—to adhere to the Law of Moses filtered through the exoteric and esoteric rabbinic traditions—necessarily entails the denial that Jesus is the Savior anticipated by Scripture. It is, therefore, to negate what Jesus Himself affirmed.

Moreover, to be a “faithful Jew” in the modern world involves taking offense at our Lord’s treatment of the Law (to say nothing of the treatment of the Law by His apostles). Jesus evidently saw Himself not as the student of Moses but as His superior, and He dealt with the Mosaic prescriptions accordingly, drawing the ire of the Pharisees and their rabbinic successors.

In short, the things by which Christ defined Himself, the things that render Him worthy of worship in the eyes of His followers, are the same things that disturb the sensibilities of the “faithful Jew.” The very deeds and words that mark our Lord as the Lord simultaneously set Him apart from and at odds with Judaism, as normally understood. If Jesus was a “faithful Jew,” then, for example, Maimonides was not, and vice versa.

The same can be said of the ethnically Jewish members of the primitive Church. Following the doctrine of Jesus, and operating in the light of His death, Resurrection, and glorification, they espoused a reading of Scripture sharply disputed within Israel. Consequently, the mode and substance of their worship and teaching radically diverged from that of their kinsmen who spurned Christ, and they were charged with blasphemy and subjected to severe persecution (Acts 6:11, Galatians 1:13-14).

The divergence between Christianity and Judaism only accelerated with the influx of Gentiles into the New Covenant assembly, which diminished certain Jewish cultural characteristics that initially attached thereto, and the destruction of the second temple by the Romans, which fundamentally altered the practice of Judaism. The two religions subsequently developed in parallel, often reacting against the other, such that today they are quite estranged, if not utterly alienated.

But, note well, this separation has its root in none other than Jesus and His message, which many Jews, then and now, dismiss as totally incompatible with Judaism. From the standard Jewish perspective, Jesus was a faithless Jew (Matthew 26:65, John 10:33). The ultimate heretic, arguably!

No one would call a Christian a “faithful Jew.” Why, then, do some—men who should know better—call Jesus, the author of Christianity, a “faithful Jew?” Jesus made claims that the “faithful Jew” (again, in the modern sense) does not receive. He delivered to mankind a religion that the “faithful Jew” does not embrace. (Of course, Jesus was a “faithful Jew” insofar as He realized and completed the true meaning of the Law that distinguishes Judaism, but this does not seem to be the import of the term as used by the likes of Cardinal Dolan and Professor George.)

The idea is just not intellectually serious. At best, it is a well-intentioned but deceptive expression meant to draw attention to the origins of Christianity in the Law and the Prophets. At worst, it is a bit of clever wordplay meant to conceal discrepancies that should be illuminated, lest souls perish—namely, the souls of our Lord’s own brethren according to the flesh, the Jews. God retains a mysterious affection for them (Romans 11:28-32). We honor this affection by dispensing with verbal sleights of hand and preaching to them the Gospel, which has ever been heralded in their midst (Galatians 3:8) and which they will, by God’s grace, eventually heed (Romans 11:25-27).

This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.

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In his book Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, the Marxist historian Eric Foner advances a revisionist history of the Reconstruction Era. In his preface, he explains why revisionist history is important:

Revising interpretations of the past is intrinsic to the study of history… Since the early 1960s, a profound alteration of the place of blacks within American society, newly uncovered evidence, and changing definitions of history itself have combined to transform our understanding of race relations, politics, and economic change during Reconstruction.

Murray Rothbard distinguished between revisionism whose aim is to expose the truth about history, and revisionism designed merely to promote the official version of history: “A venerable institution, furthermore, is the official or ‘court’ historian, dedicated to purveying the rulers’ views of their own and their predecessors’ actions.” Foner’s task in revising the history of the Reconstruction Era is, as he sees it, “to produce a coherent new portrait,” one that is more in line with “a profound change in the nation’s politics and racial attitudes.” In this sense, he may be described as a court historian promoting the official vision of racial diversity and integration. The “unfinished revolution” of his title emphasizes the radical transformation in race relations in the South. To further advance the revolution, he set out to displace the historians associated with “William Dunning, John W. Burgess, and their students.” In his book he argues that there is a need “to deal the final blow to the Dunning School.” More recently, he said his intention in writing about the Reconstruction era was to “put the final nail” in the Dunning School,

Reconstruction is one of the most misunderstood periods of American history, and I hoped my work would put the final nail in the Dunning School [a cadre of scholars whose work promoted the idea that Reconstruction ruined the South, and freedmen were incapable of self-government].

The problem with the Dunning School historians, as Foner sees it, is that they interpreted historical facts in a manner that is “racist.” He criticized them for failing to appreciate the contributions made by freedmen to reconstructing the South, and took umbrage at their racially insensitive turn-of-the-century language. They used words like “negro” which are now prohibited by the political-correctness manual. The Dunning School historians were not hugely interested in Foner’s main subject, namely, race relations and socialist revolution. He therefore criticizes them for failing to center blacks in their historical narrative, remarking that “blacks in fact played little role in the [Dunning School] narratives.” According to Foner, by failing to give due accord to the role of black people, the Dunning School fails to align with the eradication of “white supremacy” and, therefore, almost by default, it helps to entrench white supremacy. He therefore blames the Dunning School for racial segregation in the South, forgetting that racial segregation was invented in Connecticut and Massachusetts in the 1830s.

Dunning School historians aimed to document the history of the South at a pivotal time. For example, in Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama, Walter L. Fleming observes that black legislators and voters were easily manipulated by Northern “carpetbaggers” and corrupt officials. Court historians argue that in this way Fleming implies that black people inherently lack the capacity for independent political thought. They see it as racist to observe that black people “were the tools of the Radical leaders” because, in their view, it dehumanizes black people and implies that they are racially inferior. It is “racist” to state that black people in the “carpetbagger” government were self-serving or corrupt, or that they made decisions purely to curry favor or for financial reward. Court historians argue that such interpretations marginalize the agency of black people, portraying them as unfit for political roles. Minimizing the contributions they made to the reconstruction government in turn justifies white supremacy as necessary to restore and maintain law and order. Arguing that blacks made little significant contribution to society and governance during Reconstruction, or even questioning their loyalty or intentions toward the South, is “racist.”

Double Standards

Eric Foner is a favorite of court historians, who have showered him with accolades for displacing the “racist” Dunning School. But the same court historians have a completely different perspective on “racism” in the context of another contested issue of black history, namely, black Confederates. Court historians reject the notion that black people played any important role in the antebellum South—other than their role as unpaid slave labor. In this context, we hear nothing about the need to center black people—unless we are centering them as slaves. The court historians’ exhortation concerning black Confederates is the precise opposite of that advanced concerning Reconstruction—in understanding the Confederate era we must marginalize and even erase the role of black men.

Court historians do not accept that black people could possibly have seen the South as their home. After all, as the New York Times 1619 project reminds us, they were kidnapped from Africa and regarded by Southerners as nothing but slaves. Marxist theories of exploitation teach that slaves were so brutalized that they had no feeling of loyalty and certainly no conceptualization of home and hearth. In relation to black men like Harrison Berry who rejected the abolitionist adventurers of the North, they argue that such men were merely expressing the opinions of their masters. They believe that black people inherently lacked the capacity for independent political thought, and men like Charles Benger or Holt Collier who marched with Confederates were merely the tools of Confederate officers. Black men who expressed devotion to Confederates did so for self-serving reasons—perhaps to curry favor with Confederates or even in hope of financial reward.

These double standards infuse the discourse on black Southerners. Court historians do not worry that their interpretations may dehumanize blacks or imply that blacks are inferior, nor are they concerned that it marginalizes the agency of black people, portrays them as unfit to serve in important roles, and minimizes their contributions to the Southern cause. In this context court historians are noticeably blasé about what might seem “racist.” After all, unlike the Dunning School, court historians are the self-appointed good people so nothing they say could possibly be perceived as racist. They innocently demand strict proof that blacks made any significant contribution to the Southern cause. The emphasis is on the word “significant,” as all evidence that goes against the official narrative can readily be dismissed as trivial.

For example, Foner says there may have been a few black Confederates, but nothing significant: “It’s no surprise that a few did [bear arms and fight], but there is little evidence for the combat role of blacks in the Confederate army,” says he. Any stated loyalty or intentions of black people—which were widely reported in the newspapers of the era—must therefore be met with skepticism and questioned unless there is conclusive corroborative evidence such as photographs and official Confederate government records. Do you have primary source evidence of a Confederate government meeting where the minutes record the Confederate President himself extolling the significance of Holt Collier, the black Confederate cavalryman and sharpshooter? Do you have photographs of Holt Collier on the battlefield, at the front, actively shooting at Yankees?

It so happens that none of the available historical evidence—whether from the Official Records of the war or from other reports of the time, suffices to satisfy the court historians. The presumption that black Confederates made no significant or valuable contribution to the Southern cause, and were of little benefit to the Southern war effort or the broader Southern society, is deemed to be so strong that it is all but impossible to displace. Although Foner acknowledges that “slaves have often taken up arms on the road to citizenship, and it would be foolish to think slaves could not bear arms and fight for their owners’ side”, he insists that “we find more acting as personal servants, cooks, laundresses in Confederate camps, not being armed for battle.” Laundresses? We are to believe black men were only in the army to cook for soldiers and launder their uniforms. Charley Benger—who was described by his captain as “a faithful old soldier and a devoted old friend”—is typically depicted in derisive terms as a man who “claimed” to be a free man who served in the Georgia armies. He “claimed” to be free? It seems he was not capable of being quite certain whether he was free or not, or at any rate we should not take his word for it as to whether he was free.

Benger claimed to be a free African American man who served when the British invaded Darien, Ga. … Benger was well-liked among his comrades and soldiers would roll him around in a wheelbarrow to camp where he was greeted with cheers.

We also learn that Benger “was a side clown show” and should therefore not be memorialized among the “real” soldiers: “Mayor Lester Miller has opted to not authorize the donation of a plaque in honor of a Black Confederate fifer.”

The fact that the Macon Volunteers buried him with full military honors is deemed to be irrelevant, because playing the fife is considered insignificant. The official narrative is that black men who marched with Confederates merely did housekeeping chores and rolled around in wheelbarrows to entertain the troops. That is not worthy of a memorial plaque. Only white men count as “real” soldiers. These are the messages brought to us by court historians who denounce the Dunning School for referring to blacks, as Foner puts it, “as passive victims of white manipulation or as unthinking people.” Yet, it is not racist or white supremacist at all when court historians do precisely that of which they accuse the Dunning School. It seems that double standards are acceptable if they help to advance the establishment narrative.

The post The Double Standards of Court Historians in War and Reconstruction appeared first on LewRockwell.

Former Russian President and top Kremlin national security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that European leaders had failed to outplay Donald Trump, and that it remains unclear just how Ukraine’s Zelensky will prevent the issue of territorial concessions.

White House officials, including Trump himself in prior statements, have made it known that compromise regarding territory is indeed on the table. “The anti-Russian warmongering Coalition of the Willing failed to outplay @POTUS on his turf,” Medvedev said on X. “Europe thanked & sucked up to him.” The below optics certainly don’t contradict Medvedev. One commenter observes that Trump had likely “been waiting for a moment like this his whole life”…

Medvedev said the question remains “what tune” Zelenskyy would play “about guarantees & territories back home, once he’s put on his green military uniform again.”

It is true that far-right elements within his own military and political establishment would react fiercely to any acts of territorial concessions – which would likely result in acts of violence, and possibly even threats on Zelensky’s life.

At the same time, coming off his Alaska summit with Trump, Russia’s President Putin remains firmly in the driver’s seat, amid steady ground advances on the battlefield.

During a break in Monday’s meeting among seven EU officials and Zelensky, German Chancellor Merz revealed during a break in talks, “the American president spoke with the Russian president on the phone and agreed that there would be a meeting between the Russian president and the Ukrainian president within the next two weeks.”

But whether this happens or not will largely depend of what happens in the interim, and Kiev’s attitude and statements on what it’s willing to concede.

The geopolitics source Moon of Alabama highlights the perspective of former MI6 official and diplomat Alastair Crooke in the following:

Alastair Crooke suggests (video) that the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine will follow the outline of the Istanbul Agreement negotiated in March 2022 between Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine, under pressure from the West, had at that time refrained from signing it.

The Istanbul Agreement did include security guarantees (emphasis added):

The agreement assumes:
…
2. Possible guarantor states: Great Britain, China, Russia, the United States, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, Israel. The free accession of other states to the treaty is proposed, in particular the Russian Federation proposes Belarus.
…
4. Ukraine does not join any military alliances, does not deploy foreign military bases and contingents, and conducts international military exercises only with the consent of the guarantor states. For their part, the guarantor states confirm their intention to promote Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.

5. The guarantor states and Ukraine agree that in the event of aggression, any armed attack on Ukraine or any military operation against Ukraine, each of the Guarantor States, after urgent and immediate consultations between them (which shall be held within no more than three days), in the exercise of the right to individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will provide (in response to and on the basis of an official request from Ukraine) assistance to Ukraine, as a permanently neutral state under attack, by immediately taking such individual or joint action as may be necessary, including closing airspace over Ukraine, providing necessary weapons, using armed force in order to restore and subsequently maintain the security of Ukraine as a permanently neutral state.

Any such armed attack (any military operation) and all measures taken as a result thereof shall be immediately reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall cease when the Security Council takes the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

The mechanism for implementing security guarantees for Ukraine, based on the results of additional consultations between Ukraine and the Guarantor States, will be regulated in the Treaty, taking into account protection from possible provocations.

Again:

… such guarantee will of course come with conditions attached to it. Either Ukraine will accept those or it will never be secure from outer interference.

So yes, the Ukraine can have ‘security guarantees’. But the conditions of those will be set by the main guarantor – which has to be Russia.

Trump seems to have understood that. How long will it take those European ‘leaders’ to get it?

Alastair Crooke speaks to Judge Andrew Napolitano:

Some of the awkward moments, optics, and tensions on display in the White House on Monday are consistent with the above take…

Below are some more Tuesday geopolitical headlines and developments via Newsquawk….

• US and Europe to work immediately on Ukraine security guarantees, via Bloomberg.
• Poland PM Tusk will take part in meeting of the Coalition of the Willing at 11:00BST/06:00EDT, according to a spokesperson.
• Ukraine Foreign Minister says future trilateral leaders meeting can bring a breakthrough on the path to peace.
• US President Trump posted that he had a very good meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky and European leaders, which ended in a further meeting in the Oval Office and during the meeting, they discussed security guarantees for Ukraine, which would be provided by the various European countries with coordination with the US. Trump added everyone is very happy about the possibility of peace for Russia and Ukraine, and at the conclusion of the meetings, he called Russian President Putin and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelensky. Furthermore, Trump said after that meeting takes place, they will have a trilateral between Trump, Putin and Zelensky, as well as noted that this was a very good, early step for a war that has been going on for almost four years and that VP Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, and Special Envoy Witkoff are coordinating with Russia and Ukraine.
• Russia’s Kremlin said US President Trump and Russian President Putin held a phone call which lasted 40 minutes and they discussed the idea of exploring the possibility of raising the level of Russian and Ukrainian representatives in the negotiations, while Putin warmly thanked Trump for the hospitality and well-organized meeting in Alaska, as well as for progress achieved at the summit. Furthermore, Putin and Trump spoke in favour of the continuation of direct talks between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations, while they agreed to continue close contact with each other on the Ukrainian crisis and other issues.
• Ukrainian President Zelensky said we need not a pause in the war, but real peace and territorial issues will be decided between Russia and Ukraine. Zelensky said he discussed security guarantees with Trump and European leaders, and received an important signal from the US on being part of security guarantees and help in coordinating it. Furthermore, he said the US offers to have a trilateral meeting as soon as possible and that Ukraine is ready for any format to meet with Putin.
• Ukraine reportedly offered a USD 100bln weapons deal to US President Trump in an effort to win security guarantees, according to the Financial Times citing documents laying out Kyiv’s proposal to Trump at the White House meeting.
• US Secretary of State Rubio told Fox News that they will work with European allies and non-European countries to build security guarantees for Ukraine. Rubio said he was in the room when Trump and Putin spoke, while he added that Trump suggested to Putin that he meet with Zelensky.
• NATO Secretary General Rutte said it was a very successful day in Washington where security guarantees were discussed and more details on security guarantees will be discussed in the coming days, while he added it is a breakthrough that the US will get involved and they are discussing some Article 5-type arrangement.
• European Commission President Von der Leyen said after the White House meeting that they are here as allies and friends for peace in Ukraine and in Europe, while she added this is an important moment as they continue to work on strong security guarantees for Ukraine.
• German Chancellor Merz that he feels these are decisive days for Ukraine and is not sure if Russian President Putin will have the courage to come to a summit with Zelensky present, while he added that expectations were not only met but were exceeded from this meeting. Merz also stated that US President Trump spoke with Russian President Putin and agreed that a Putin-Zelenskiy meeting will happen within two weeks, while the location is yet undecided, and that will be followed by a three-way meeting involving Trump.
• Finland’s President Stubb said they agreed on security guarantees and steps forward, as well as noted that talks were constructive and the Coalition of the Willing has already worked on security guarantees which they will build upon. Stubb also stated there is nothing concrete about US participation in security guarantees and that US President will inform them, with details of security guarantees to be ironed out in the next week or so.
• Debris from a destroyed Ukrainian drone sparked a fire at an oil refinery and hospital in Russia’s Volgograd, according to the regional administration.
• North Korea leader Kim said joint US-South Korea military drills show willingness for war provocation, while he also stated that the security environment requires North Korea to expand its nuclear armament rapidly.
• “Israeli media: The Chief of Staff will present today to the Minister of Defense the plan to occupy Gaza City”, according to Al Arabiya.

* * *

The next big question and milestone will be whether this series of high-level peace meetings will continue, leading to the big trilateral Putin-Trump-Zelensky meeting that the White House is hoping for.

Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge.

The post ‘Coalition Of The Willing’ Failed To Outplay Trump, Russia’s Medvedev Says appeared first on LewRockwell.

The August 15 meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Donald Trump might not be as historic as some want to make it out to be, but it’s certainly a good thing that leaders of the world’s two most prominent military superpowers are talking rather than trading insults or hurling 11,000 thermonuclear warheads at each other. Putin and Trump don’t need to agree on everything, but negotiations are undoubtedly a major development and potentially the first step toward ending the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict. However, it seems not everyone is so keen on achieving sustainable peace. On the contrary, the European Union and NATO are determined to ensure the bloodshed continues for as long as possible.

As soon as Trump proposed a three-way summit with Putin and Zelensky, the increasingly irrelevant Brussels, London, Berlin and Paris decided that this is “unfair” and that they’re being “sidelined”. They insist on the so-called “Article 5-style security guarantees”, while expecting Russia to just “admit defeat” despite the fact that its military is not the one losing on the battlefield. The Trump administration itself is also talking about these NATO-like guarantees, but is at least far more realistic, and it doesn’t demand that Moscow simply withdraw and let the Neo-Nazi junta occupy the four oblasts (regions) that joined Russia. American special envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN that “security guarantees offering Ukraine ‘Article 5-like protections’ are the real prize”.

“We didn’t think that we were anywhere close to agreeing to Article 5 protection from the United States in legislative enshrinement within the Russian Federation, not to go after any other territory when the peace deal is codified,” he stated in the aftermath of the Putin-Trump summit, later adding: “We got to an agreement that the United States and other European nations could effectively offer Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee.”

It should be noted that the United States would undoubtedly prefer such an outcome, as it would effectively “steal” a victory from Russia. This is the standard practice used by Washington DC, its vassals and satellite states when their wars aren’t going as planned. Ceasefires are only encouraged when an American proxy is losing, while peace deals are signed only when the outcome is beneficial to the political West. However, in the case of the EU/NATO and the United Kingdom, things are not as simple. Despite showing no sustainable solutions or proposals for a more permanent peace, Brussels and London are determined to keep the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict going for as long as possible and no matter the cost (especially for former Ukraine).

Unsurprisingly, the Neo-Nazi junta is fully onboard with this, opting to not only continue the war, but to also escalate it. Namely, after the FSB and the Russian military neutralized much of the Kiev regime’s “Sapsan” missile program, the latter tried to salvage its remnants to finally start using it on the battlefield. However, the Kremlin put a definite stop to such plans by targeting a large storage housing a large number of “Sapsan” missiles. On August 17, the Russian military launched a long-range strike, destroying the aforementioned storage facility and the advanced weapons stored in it, ensuring that the Neo-Nazi junta forces cannot use them. Moscow is yet to formally release additional information on the strike, but the Kiev regime is undoubtedly furious.

And yet, it would seem this isn’t the end of its ambitions to acquire long-range strike capabilities and jeopardize Russia. Namely, on August 17, numerous media outlets revealed that the Neo-Nazi junta has adopted a new type of long-range cruise missile, named “Flamingo”. According to the Associated Press (AP) photojournalist Efrem Lukatsky, it’s already in serial production. He was given the permission to take photos of the “Flamingo” at an undisclosed location, supposedly a production facility belonging to Fire Point, one of the Kiev regime’s military-industrial enterprises. Lukatsky claims that the cruise missile has a range of 3,000 km. If true, this would put not only all of European Russia within its range, but also parts of Western Siberia.

The Neo-Nazi junta is yet to officially confirm the existence of the missile and its technical specifications, but even if the range is only 50% of the one claimed by Lukatsky, it would constitute a major escalation. On the outside, “Flamingo” looks like a crossover between the Nazi German V-1 flying bomb (effectively an early cruise missile concept) and the Soviet-era Tu-141/143 turbojet-powered drone. Although by no means a revolutionary design that should worry the Russian military, the relatively large size of the warhead compartment suggests it would certainly be a threat to residential areas across Russia’s massive expanse. The Kiev regime is increasingly desperate to fill the “PR quota” that can be used to cover up its atrocious battlefield performance.

Weapons such as “Flamingo” could cause massive casualties if used indiscriminately, which the Neo-Nazi junta is quite prone to. As an added “bonus”, this would also derail any future peace talks, as Moscow would have little to no reason to continue negotiations amid such developments. And it seems this was a long-term plan that the Kiev regime is not ready to abandon. Back in November 2024, its frontman Volodymyr Zelensky announced that “100 missiles have been produced”, without specifying what kind. This statement could’ve actually been a reference to the “Flamingo”. Back in April, he claimed that “over 40% of the weapons used on the front line are now produced in Ukraine, including over 95% of drones used on the battlefield”.

All this suggests that the Neo-Nazi junta is determined to continue the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict no matter what Putin and Trump agree on. In addition, the EU/NATO and the endemically Russophobic United Kingdom are the principal backers of this idea and are willing to circumvent the Trump administration’s efforts to make a deal with Russia. The new US government is trying to focus more on China, because it sees the Asian giant as “the bigger threat”. The increasingly impotent “old continent” is now faced with the prospect of having to face Russia on its own. The historical track record of such confrontations is certainly not on Europe’s side, so it would be wise for Brussels and London to carefully reconsider their policies of constant escalation.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

The post Neo-Nazi Junta’s New Weapons Scream: ‘No Peace Deal!’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Constitutional Court would likely have to rule on this hypothetical scenario due to 2020’s constitutional amendment prohibiting the cession of Russian territory except in certain cases.

RT’s report on Steve Witkoff’s claim that Russia has made “some concessions” on territorial issues, which signal a “significant” shift towards “moderation”, prompted talk about whether Putin can legally stop the special operation without first controlling all the disputed territory that Moscow claims as its own. He himself demanded in June 2024 that the Ukrainian Armed Forces “must be withdrawn from the entire territory of these regions within their administrative borders at the time of their being part of Ukraine.”

Moreover, the agreements under which Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson joined Russia all describe their administrative boundaries as those that existed “on the day of [their] formation”, thus suggesting that the entirety of their regions are indeed legally considered by Russia to be its own. Putin also famously declared during the signing of those treaties in late September 2022 that “the people living [there] have become our citizens, forever” and that “Russia will not betray [their choice to join it]”.

Nevertheless, Putin could still hypothetically “moderate” this demand. Article 67.2.1 of the Russian Constitution, which entered into force after 2020’s constitutional referendum, stipulates that “Actions (except delimitation, demarcation, and re-demarcation of the state border of the Russian Federation with adjacent states) aimed at alienating part of the territory of the Russian Federation, as well as calls for such actions, are not permitted.” “Moderation” could thus hypothetically be an “exception”.

To be absolutely clear, no call is being made within this analysis for Russia to “cede” any territory that it considers to be its own, nor have any Russian officials lent any credence whatsoever to Witkoff’s claim. That said, if Putin concludes for whatever reason that Russia’s national interests are now best served by “moderating” its territorial claims after all that happened since September 2022’s referenda, then any proposed “re-demarcation of the state border” would likely require the Constitutional Court’s approval.

He’s a lawyer by training so it would make sense for him to proactively ask them to rule on the legality of this hypothetical solution to the Ukrainian Conflict. Even if he instead hypothetically proposes retaining his country’s territorial claims but freezing the military phase of the conflict and only advancing those claims through political means, he’d still likely seek their judgement too. They’re the final authority on constitutional issues and these scenarios require their expertise per their connection to Article 67.2.1.

If they hypothetically rule in his favor, the question would then arise about the fate of those living in the Ukrainian-controlled parts of those regions who Putin said “have become our citizens, forever.” They might rule that those who didn’t take part in the referenda, such as the residents of Zaporozhye city, aren’t Russian citizens. Those that did but then fell under Ukrainian control, such as the residents of Kherson city, might be deemed citizens who could move to Russia if Ukraine lets them as part of a deal.

To remind the reader, no Russian officials at the time of this analysis’ publication have lent any credence whatsoever to Witkoff’s claim that Russia made “some concessions” on territorial issues, so it remains solely a hypothetical scenario for now. Even so, Putin might hypothetically conclude that such “moderation” is the best way to advance Russia’s national interests in the current context (such as part of a grand compromise), in which case the Constitutional Court would likely have to rule on its legality.

This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

The post Can Putin Legally Stop the Conflict Without First Controlling All the Disputed Territory? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Nothing changed due to yesterday’s meetings.

Ukraine offers $100bn weapons deal to Trump to win security guarantees (archived) – Financial Times, Aug 19 2025

Ukraine will promise to buy $100bn of American weapons financed by Europe in a bid to obtain US guarantees for its security after a peace settlement with Russia, according to a document seen by the Financial Times.

—

Alexander G. Rubio @AlexanderGRubi2 – 2:22 UTC · Aug 19, 2025

The plan is for the US to sell weapons to the Europeans, who will then provide them to Kiev. However, the US doesn’t have the weapons to sell, the Europeans don’t have the money to buy, and Kiev doesn’t have the soldiers to use them. Other than that it’s a foolproof plan.

—

[Putin] noted that these individuals have “happily carried out any order from the president in Washington under Biden,” but “got confused when Trump suddenly won” the November election.

“They just don’t like Trump, they actively fought him, interfered in political life, in the US election… Trump has different ideas about what is good and what is bad, including in gender policy, in some other issues, and they don’t like it,” Putin said. […]

“I assure you, Trump, with his character and persistence, will restore order quite quickly. And all of them, you’ll see, soon all of them will stand at the master’s feet and gently wag their tails,” Putin argued.

European leaders will ‘wag tails’ for Trump – Putin – RT, Feb 2 2025

Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand – 7:48 UTC · Aug 19, 2025

This is beyond parody: not only is the EU doing virtually nothing to escape the protection racket it’s under with the US, it’s now supposed to pay for Ukraine’s…

All the more absurd when one considers that NATO expansion – the institutionalization of this protection racket – was the primary catalyst for this conflict.

Reprinted with permission from Moon  of Alabama.

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Washington’s appetite for power is growing—and the results are dangerous. From unilateral tariffs that punish American families, to endless wars launched without congressional approval, to the steady march toward authoritarian “clean-ups” in D.C., liberty is under assault. In this episode, we break down how economic meddling, foreign entanglements, and unchecked executive power are eroding the Constitution and concentrating authority where it doesn’t belong.

The post Unilateral Tariffs, Endless Wars, and the March Toward Authoritarianism appeared first on LewRockwell.

. . . of the Ludwig von Mises Institute Germany by Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Guido Hulsmann, and Rolf Puster.  

The post Resignations from the Scientific Advisory Board . . . appeared first on LewRockwell.

Aka, FOX News (or Faux News).  In 2014 the CIA/NATO/U.S. government crime family overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine and installed their puppet.  Yesterday on FOX News a panel including a “former” CIA spook pretended to have mystical mind-reading abilities by arguing that Putin’s intention is to overthrow the current “democratically elected government” of Ukraine and install a Russian puppet.  Day is night.  Black is white.  Yes means No.

The post The Pinocchio News Network 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 una storia di cartelli, a livello sovrastatale e sovranazionale, la cui pianificazione centrale ha raggiunto un punto in cui deve essere riformata radicalmente e questa riforma radicale non può avvenire senza una dose di dolore economico che potrebbe mettere a repentaglio la loro autorità. Da qui la risposta al Grande Default attraverso il Grande Reset. Questa la storia di un coyote, che quando non riesce a sfamarsi all'esterno ricorre all'autofagocitazione. Lo stesso accaduto ai membri del G7, dove i sei membri restanti hanno iniziato a fagocitare il settimo: gli Stati Uniti.

____________________________________________________________________________________

(Versione audio della traduzione disponibile qui: https://open.substack.com/pub/fsimoncelli/p/lo-scandalo-russiagate-supera-il)

Quindi la bufala è finalmente riconosciuta come tale anche a livello ufficiale. Il “Russiagate” – ovvero la narrazione mainstream – è ora descritto dai capi dell'intelligence americana come una montatura architettata per ribaltare i risultati delle elezioni presidenziali statunitensi del 2016.

Tulsi Gabbard, l'attuale Direttrice dell'Intelligence Nazionale (DNI), e il direttore della CIA, John Ratcliffe, hanno entrambi accusato l'ex-Presidente Barack Obama di aver partecipato a una “cospirazione” per sovvertire il processo costituzionale. Non è solo Obama a essere implicato in questo grave crimine, anche altri ex-alti funzionari della sua amministrazione 2013-17, tra cui l'ex-DNI James Clapper, il direttore della CIA John Brennan e il capo dell'FBI James Comey. Se giustizia sarà fatta, le ripercussioni politiche saranno davvero sconvolgenti.

Il potenziale impatto non si limita alla sola violazione delle leggi statunitensi e del processo democratico – già di per sé gravi. Lo scandalo Russiagate, iniziato nel 2016, ha avuto un effetto duraturo e dannoso sulle relazioni tra Stati Uniti ed Europa e la Russia.

La pericolosa guerra per procura della NATO scatenata in Ucraina, che minaccia di degenerare in una guerra mondiale su vasta scala, è stata alimentata in gran parte dall'ostilità generata dalle false accuse di ingerenza russa nelle elezioni statunitensi.

Le accuse secondo cui il presidente russo Vladimir Putin avrebbe supervisionato una campagna sovversiva contro le elezioni americane del 2016 e avrebbe colluso con Donald Trump per farlo eleggere sono sempre state pretestuose. Lo scandalo si basava su informazioni di intelligence scadenti, volte a spiegare presumibilmente come Trump avesse sconfitto la sua rivale, Hillary Clinton. Successivamente lo scandalo è stato gonfiato fino a trasformarlo in una narrazione apparentemente credibile dai capi dell'intelligence statunitense, su indicazione dell'allora presidente Barack Obama, per delegittimare il primo mandato presidenziale di Trump.

Anni prima delle recenti rivelazioni di intelligence, molti giornalisti indipendenti, tra cui Aaron Maté, ed ex-analisti di intelligence come Ray MacGovern e William Binney, avevano confutato in modo convincente le affermazioni ufficiali sul Russiagate. Non solo queste affermazioni erano false, ma erano consapevolmente false. Vale a dire, bugie e distorsioni deliberate. La Russia non ha hackerato le email appartenenti al Comitato Nazionale Democratico per screditare la Clinton. La sua corruzione è stata svelata da una fuga di notizie interna al DNC e date in pasto a Wikileaks. Questo è stato in parte il motivo per cui Assange è stato perseguitato con anni di carcere.

Un numero sufficientemente ampio di elettori disprezzava la Clinton e la sua psicopatia guerrafondaia, così come il suo tradimento della classe operaia americana in cambio della generosità di Wall Street.

Inoltre Mosca ha costantemente negato qualsiasi coinvolgimento nel tentativo di influenzare le elezioni statunitensi del 2016 o di favorire Trump. Putin ha affermato più di una volta che la Russia non ha preferenze su chi diventerà presidente degli Stati Uniti, sottintendendo che siano tutti uguali e controllati da forze statali più profonde. È ridicolo, inoltre, che mentre Washington abbia accusato Mosca di interferenze elettorali, i fatti dimostrano che gli Stati Uniti hanno abitualmente interferito in decine di elezioni straniere per molti decenni, comprese quelle russe. Nessun'altra nazione si avvicina agli Stati Uniti – l'autoproclamato “leader del mondo libero” – nel sabotare le elezioni straniere.

In ogni caso, è istruttivo paragonare la farsa del Russiagate allo scandalo Watergate.

Il Watergate fu un caso di spionaggio da parte della Casa Bianca di Nixon ai danni di un rivale democratico durante le elezioni del 1972. La crisi politica che ne seguì portò alle sue dimissioni in disgrazia nel 1974. Gli Stati Uniti rimasero scioccati da questi sporchi trucchi. Diversi alti funzionari della Casa Bianca furono in seguito condannati e scontarono una pena detentiva per crimini legati alla vicenda. Nixon fu poi graziato dal suo successore, Gerald Ford, ed evitò il processo. Ciononostante il Watergate disonorò in modo indelebile la politica statunitense e, all'epoca, fu descritto come “il peggior scandalo politico del XX secolo”.

I successivi casi di corruzione e illeciti vengono spesso definiti con il suffisso “-gate”, in omaggio al Watergate, considerato un'epocale rovina politica. Da qui il nome “Russiagate”.

Tuttavia ci sono differenze estremamente importanti.

Mentre il Watergate fu uno scandalo basato su crimini e illeciti concreti, il Russiagate è stato sempre un inganno propagandistico artificioso.

Il vero scandalo dietro il Russiagate non sono stati i presunti misfatti di Trump o quelli della Russia, ma la cospirazione criminale di Obama e della sua amministrazione per sabotare le elezioni del 2016 e successivamente rovesciare la presidenza Trump e la volontà del popolo americano. Tulsi Gabbard, il capo dell'intelligence di grado più alto del Paese, ha affermato che questo equivale a “tradimento” e ha chiesto il perseguimento di Obama e di altri ex-alti funzionari.

Probabilmente il vero scandalo Russiagate è molto più devastante nelle sue implicazioni politiche rispetto al Watergate. Quest'ultimo riguardava spionaggio illegale e trucchetti, mentre il Russiagate coinvolgeva un presidente e i suoi capi dell'intelligence che cercavano di sovvertire l'intero processo democratico. Non solo, ma anche i media generalisti statunitensi sono ora stati smascherati per aver perpetrato un furto propagandistico ai danni del popolo americano. Tutti i principali media statunitensi hanno amplificato le informazioni di intelligence orchestrate dall'amministrazione Obama, sostenendo che la Russia avesse interferito nelle elezioni e che Trump fosse un “fantoccio del Cremlino”. La bufala è diventata un'ossessione per i media statunitensi per anni e ha accumulato gravi danni nelle relazioni internazionali, un'eredità nefasta con cui conviviamo ancora oggi.

Il New York Times e il Washington Post, considerati due dei massimi esponenti del giornalismo americano, hanno vinto congiuntamente il Premio Pulitzer nel 2018 per il loro reportage sul Russiagate, ovvero la versione ufficiale, che ha dato credibilità alla bufala. Alla luce di ciò che sappiamo ora, questi giornali dovrebbero vergognarsi di aver condotto una campagna di menzogne in stile Goebbels non solo per ingannare l'opinione pubblica statunitense, ma anche per sovvertire il processo democratico e avvelenare le relazioni internazionali. La loro reputazione è stata distrutta, così come quella di altri importanti media, tra cui ABC, CBS, CNN e NBC.

Ironia della sorte il Washington Post vinse il Premio Pulitzer nel 1973 per il suo reportage sullo scandalo Watergate. La storia fu trasposta in un best-seller, “Tutti gli uomini del presidente”, e in un film di successo con Robert Redford e Dustin Hoffman, nei ruoli degli intrepidi giornalisti Bob Woodward e Carl Bernstein. Woodward, Bernstein e il Washington Post furono acclamati come il meglio del giornalismo statunitense per aver smascherato il Watergate e aver assicurato alla giustizia un presidente corrotto.

Quanto è vergognoso e assurdo che un attacco ancora più grave alla democrazia americana e alle relazioni internazionali, sotto forma del Russiagate, venga ignorato e insabbiato dai “migliori d'America”! Che lo scandalo venga ignorato e insabbiato non dovrebbe sorprendere, perché rivelarlo in modo appropriato manderebbe in frantumi le fondamenta dell'establishment politico statunitense e il ruolo sinistro dello Stato profondo e del suo sistema di propaganda mediatica.

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

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This newsletter was created out of a desire to help others, and each day I hear from dozens of readers with thoughtful and pressing questions. For a while I tried my best to answer them, but given the volume and how long writing in-depth articles takes—it’s no longer possible (e.g., I’ve spent the last week learning the nuances of organ donation regulations for an article reviewing the tangible spiritual consequences from non-consensually harvested organs—a surprisingly common issue).

To strike a balance, I’ve started hosting monthly open threads. These serve as a space where readers can share questions—especially follow-ups from still unaddressed topics—and I make a point of answering them. Keeping everything in one thread also makes it easier for others to learn from the discussion.

Each open thread also features a theme; usually a topic I’ve been reflecting on but haven’t yet written about in full. For this month, I want to focus on a frustrating but common issue—constipation.

Note: since there are also many questions about this publication and how its contents can help each reader, I recently revised a page covering all of that here.

Missing Bowel Movements

Over the last year, I’ve received quite a few correspondences from readers asking me to write about constipation. This I believe is reflective of how widespread but rarely discussed constipation is, especially as one becomes older (where it often becomes a primary concern of everyday life). Likewise, the primary diagnosis for constipation is “chronic idiopathic constipation” (CIC). Idiopathic, for reference, means “no one knows why” which is remarkable given that existing studies find between 9-20% of adults (averaging at 14%) have CIC. This figure in turn varies greatly by country:

In tandem, there is no clear consensus on how to treat CIC (e.g., if you review the treatment guidelines, you will see they vary greatly depending on which country they were made in).

Likewise, the majority of patients do not even discuss their condition with their doctors:

Overall, 4,702 participants had experienced constipation (24.0% met the Rome IV CIC criteria). Among all respondents with previous constipation, 37.6% discussed their symptoms with a clinician (primary care provider 87.6%, gastroenterologist 26.0%, and urgent care/emergency room physician 7.7%).

We found that the locus of control—the extent to which individuals believe they can control events that affect them—is associated with constipation healthcare seeking. Namely, those with lower locus of control (i.e., believe symptoms are driven by others, chance, or fate) are more likely to consult with providers regarding their symptoms. However, individuals experiencing this maladaptive cognition may be resistant to both undergoing indicated diagnostic testing and accepting and adhering to treatments, thereby undercutting treatment success and reducing patient satisfaction.

Additionally, many who seek out medical help end up getting colonoscopy, a procedure which carries real risks and has no benefit here:

Among those who sought care, 54% reported previous diagnostic testing. Colonoscopy was the most commonly performed test; 46% of health seekers specifically underwent the procedure to evaluate their constipation. Although we did not ask the respondents about alarm features or have access to their medical records to confirm the “true” indication for the procedure, this suggests potential overuse of endoscopy in the evaluation of constipation. This is an issue because the diagnostic yield of colonoscopy for constipation is limited.

Pepin and Ladabaum noted that in 234 individuals undergoing lower endoscopy solely for constipation, no cancers were found and only 3% had advanced lesions. The American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy states that colonoscopy should not be performed in the initial evaluation of constipated patients without alarm features or suspicion of organic disease. The high usage of endoscopy and other tests seen in our study, in combination with the high prevalence of constipation, further reinforces the significant impact of constipation on population health and healthcare costs and emphasizes that efforts to reduce unnecessary testing are needed.

In short, there is a surprising gap of knowledge in this area, which I believe is best demonstrated by how many times I’ve been asked to admit a patient to a hospital who was essentially just severely constipated.

Note: the current research shows constipation hospitalizes 92,000 Americans each year and results in 1.3 million visits to American emergency rooms, which again illustrates our society’s lack of knowledge in this area, especially as the rate of this is increasing (e.g., from 2006 to 2011, there was a 42 percent rise in ER visits for constipation).

The Effects of Constipation

While it is relatively unlikely one will be hospitalized for constipation, the condition nonetheless has a significant effect on their quality of life as it is stressful to be unable to defecate when you attempt to and often quite uncomfortable once too much has built up inside you. Conversely, after a large bowel movement (especially if they’ve been constipated), individuals often feel much better and clear headed.

Note: I always wondered why the sense of well-being followed passing a large stool (especially a “toxic” one). Presently, I suspect Gerald Pollack’s model provides the answer. In it, he argues that the body is constantly forming a fourth phase of water (H₃O₂) that behaves like a liquid crystal and is formed by eliminating protons from H₂O, and that this fourth phase of water makes much of life possible (e.g., it’s responsible for the structural integrity of the body and generating the flow of fluids through the body). This process however creates a large number of protons the body must excrete to maintain its negative charge, which Pollack argues occurs through the breath, sweat, feces and urine. I, in turn, suspect that the rapid sense of well being individuals feel after certain bowel movements is a result of the electrical charge gradient of the body normalizing, as many of the descriptions I’ve heard match what happens when there is an improvement of the physiologic zeta potential (which likewise comes from increasing the net negative charge of the body).

Furthermore, constipation frequently results in a variety of significant issues. Most commonly, we recognize its connection to the fact the pressure created by strained bowel movements can lead to hemorrhoids, rectal prolapse, and anal fissures (all of which make bowel movements much more challenging).

However, it also can lead to a variety of less appreciated issues. These include:

• Dysbiosis within the gut microbiome (and the variety of complex issues which can accompany it). In many cases, the gut dysbiosis which leads to constipation results from the foods you digest not being fully digested.
Note: one of the most interesting things I learned relating to this is that SIBO (one of the more challenging gut dysbioses) often results from slowed bowel transit time, and in turn, the practitioners who I find are the most successful with treating SIBO focus on increasing peristalsis.

• Fatigue (e.g., consider this study in the elderly), headaches, abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting.

• Chronic constipation being linked to a variety of progressively more severe illnesses including diverticulitis, kidney disease, gastric and colorectal cancer, ischemic colitis, and Parkinson’s disease.

Note: certain chronic illnesses (e.g., multiple sclerosis) can cause constipation (e.g., MS does it by interfering with the normal function of nerves within the body) which is unfortunate as constipation and a dysfunctional microbiome increases one’s risk for these degenerative conditions.

The Causes of Constipation.

Since most constipation is labeled as “idiopathic” treatments to constipation are typically symptom based (which many are happy to do for the rest of their lives given how challenging constipation is to deal with). Unfortunately, while laxatives are relatively benign if used occasionally, over time, they can impair the normal function of the GI tract (e.g., they can alter the gut microbiome) and hence create a situation where one requires chronic laxative use.
Note: Dr. Hazan, an expert in this area, has also seen instances where laxatives destroyed the normal functioning of the colon which then required part of the colon to be surgically removed.

Additionally, we find one of the most commonly used laxatives (MiraLAX) can create issues because a surprising number of people have sensitivities or allergies to polyethylene glycol (e.g., I know people who were unaware they had the allergy and then had anaphylaxis after they took it as preparation for a colonoscopy along with patients who developed neurological complication from it). Furthermore, when individuals have a delayed bowel transit time (e.g., anyone who is constipated), individuals are more likely to systemically absorb MiraLAX and experience toxicity from it.

Note: one of the major concerns with the COVID vaccines was that fact the lipid nanoparticles contained within it had polyethylene glycol (PEG) and hence would affect those within the population who had an undiagnosed allergy to it. Sadly, because the medical field believes “vaccines are 100% safe and effective,” even people I know who had documented anaphylactic PEG allergies predating COVID-19 were not given exemptions from COVID vaccination (and neither were those who had documented anaphylactic reactions to the first shot).

When evaluating constipation, it’s important to consider the presence of a co-existing medical diagnosis. For example, three important conditions to be aware of if you have chronic and unusual constipation (that are easy to test for) are as follows:

• Colon Cancer. When a tumor grows in the colon, it progressively blocks transit through the colon, which in turn leads to the feces which get through becoming narrower and narrower (along with abnormal weight loss, anemia and rectal bleeding). Because of this, if you notice that gradually happening to you, it is worth getting a preliminary test to see if you made have a cancer (there are simple and complex ways to test the stools for colon cancer).
Note: red meat (especially for those who do not eat it frequently) and beet juice (which also reddens the urine) can also make the stools turn red. Because of this, I’ve had numerous panicked people contact me over the years about rectal “bleeding” they thought was a cancer which in reality was due to drinking beet juice.

• Hypothyroidism. One of the common symptoms of hypothyroidism (beyond hair loss, coldness, fatigue, and weight gain) is delayed bowel transit time. As such, if you are constipated, you need to consider if you are hypothyroid.

• Hyperparathyroidism. This is a surprisingly common but unrecognized condition which can make individuals feel quite ill (e.g., it can cause pain throughout the body, cognitive issues, arrhythmias, kidney stones, unexpected fractures and a variety of gastro intestinal issues).

Note: endometriosis can also sometimes cause constipation. Likewise, a variety of neurological disorders can affect the normal motility of the gastrointestinal tract .

In most cases however, the cause of constipation remains unknown (e.g., outside of opioid induced constipation, providers rarely evaluate if a pharmaceutical drug is contributing to it) and typically the advice given is to “eat more fiber,” which while sometimes helpful often is not. Additionally, in some cases, the benefits of fiber are not due to their stool bulking activity but rather than they directly stimulate peristalsis.
Note: conditions like slow intestinal transit or defecation disorders (such as rectocele, internal prolapse, or rectal hyposensitivity) often show limited improvement with fiber alone. Additionally, chronic fiber consumption can bind essential minerals, so it is sometimes necessary to also take an appropriate multivitamin.

• In addition to opioids, many other drugs can cause constipation as well (e.g., antacids, anticholinergics [such as those taken for incontinence] antidepressants, antihistamines, antipsychotics, calcium channel blockers, certain blood pressure medications, and NSAIDs). Because of this, if you develop constipation after starting a new prescription, it is always important to see if that drug is linked to impaired bowel movements. Additionally, iron and calcium supplements can sometimes cause constipation (e.g., iron supplements cause constipation for approximately 10% of users).

Presently, I believe there are a few major contributors to the epidemic of constipation we face that are largely overlooked. They are as follows:

• Dairy consumption (particularly in children)—which has been shown in many studies (e.g., this randomized trial found that 71.4% of children with chronic constipation not responding to laxatives significantly improved within 4 weeks of stopping dairy whereas only 11.4% of the control group, with similar results seen in this blinded crossover trial).

Note: while this is often attributed to food allergies, it may also due to the opioid-like substances in dairy (e.g., beta-casomorphin) as individuals often improve on milk lacking these substances and severe constipation (without opioid use) has been found to be reversed by naloxone (an opioid blocker). Likewise, gluten (another common cause of constipation) contains opioid like peptides (gluten exorphins) which have been shown to slow bowel transit time and cause constipation. Lastly, the variable sensitivity to these compounds (and being predisposed to constipation) may be a result of genetic susceptibility (e.g., OPRM1 A118G polymorphisms have been repeatedly shown to influence sensitivity to opioids).

• Poor diet and food triggers of constipation. Beyond dairy, we find the constipation causing agents often vary person to person (making it necessary to evaluate how each alters your bowel transit time), with the most commonly reported (ordered by the most frequent first) being cow dairy, gluten, goat’s milk, beef (red meat), legumes, eggs, fried foods, rice (white), bananas (unripe), chocolate, caffeine (excess), alcohol (excess), tea (excess).

Note: within Chinese medicine, they have an entire diagnostic model based on looking at the characteristics of one’s stools. While this is largely avoided in our society (due to the disgust it will often illicit), I have often found it to be extremely useful, and I often monitor my own stools to assess how my body is handling my current diet (or how long it takes a food to transit my GI tract). Likewise, I have had many patients who found the Chinese medicine approach to treating constipation quite helpful for them.

• Low stomach acid (which also creates a variety of other digestive issues such as pathogenic bowel colonization, acid reflux, food allergies, and nutritional deficiencies).

• A disrupted gut microbiome (which conversely becomes disrupted by bowel stasis).

• Iron supplementation (as oral iron creates constipation for about 10% of users).

• Mineral deficiencies (primarily magnesium and in some cases potassium).

• Dysfunction within the autonomic nervous system (which amongst other things is a common consequence of many of the constipation triggering drugs I listed previously).

• Chronic dehydration or an impaired zeta potential (e.g., I’ve seen numerous cases of the bowels coming back to life after a patient’s zeta potential was improved).

• Individuals not allowing themselves the time to go to the bathroom when they need to defecate as once they miss this window, they often subsequently cannot.
Note: within Chinese medicine, it is believed that different organs activate at certain times in the day. In that system, the colon activates between 5-7 AM, and I’ve had numerous patients who have found if they do not use that time to have a bowel movement at that time, it’s often quite difficult to for the rest of the day. While the time varies from person to person, I believe it is important to prioritize listening to the defecation signals your body gives you and not putting off going to the toilet.

• Our sedentary lifestyles reducing the inherent motion within the gastrointestinal tract.

• The position we go to the toilet on.

Read the Whole Article

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“Live Not by Lies!” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“He largely fabricated everything” – Natalya Reshetovskaya, first wife of Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“His writings are a mixture of some truth and big lies (as any good propagandist Solzhenitsyn followed closely Dr. Goebbels’ teachings)…The author is treated politely (in the Soviet penitentiary), has bread and bunk, warm clothes. He is not forced into hard physical labor, he reads books and has plenty of time to chat, ramble, gossip and spew out all his hatred for Stalin. He is an informant under the nickname ofVetrov, reporting his prison mates to the most hated NKVD/MGB officers. He plays chess, attends theatrical performances, listens to the radio, reads newspapers. All hisGulag Archipelago and other writings are simply a collection of unsubstantiated gossips and old Goebbels’ fairytales. In the preamble he defines his main book as “literary [fictional] research” — it sold well in the West (as history not historical fiction and that’s how he made a fortune). Horror fiction. Another “Martian War of the Worlds” thriller. Gulagis about 90% factually bullshit, anyone could easily test its veracity: just pull out any chapter and do extensive research (Solzhenitsyn did not use any archives, he in fact wrote a gigantic propagandistic article). – Rachid Masimov, Russian citizen

In 1986 Conquest affirmed that “a science-fiction attitude is a great help in understanding the Soviet Union. It isn’t so much whether they’re good or bad, exactly; they’re not bad or good as we’d be bad or good. It’s far better to look at them as Martians than as people like us.” – Hillier Bevis, English historian, LA Times, Nov. 19, 1986, Robert Conquest Wikipedia, footnote 42.

In 1995, an investigative journalist pointed out that British agent turned-historian Robert Conquest’s numbers in his famous 1968 book The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the 1930’s of twenty million civilian deaths were obtained from the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office of war propaganda (see Wikipedia and Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-1953 (2004).

Sometimes it is best for an investigative reporter to excerpt quotes from various sources at the start of an article as I have done above so the reader can connect the dots themselves rather than the writer constructing a long, boring article on the topic. I anticipate many readers will disagree with my conclusions about American propaganda unless they can understand how Russian and American historical realities have been constructed. Of course, it is imperative that this reporter not mislead readers, but I am permitted to make a case for a coherent journalistic thesis.

Below is what I have accidentally stumbled into finding about Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s famous book The Gulag Archipelago as part of research for a prior article “How All Roads Lead to London”. I now regret reading The Gulag in its entirety years ago (2,505 pages). However, this is not to just boringly set the historical record straight.

Pres. Donald Trump’s current attempt is to reveal the RussiaGate scandal as a British Intelligence Psy Op by MI-6 agent Christopher Steele to smear him and bring down his 2020 presidential election. RussiaGate was influenced by the British and American media construction of a Cold War to keep Russia and the U.S. from forming any kind of alliance against the rump British Empire. Alex Krainer, a Croatian commodities trader, has been exposing the extent and importance of the British role in RussiaGate, and the Ukraine and Gaza Wars in a series of podcasts. Every player in RussiaGate except those who were part of the DNC (U.S. Democratic National Committee) has been a British intelligence operative.

How many James Bond action movies by Ian Fleming depicting a British espionage agent fighting a covert war against the Evil Empire did I watch with rapture when I was younger? There were 25 Bond movies from 1962 to 2021. Eon Productions in London holds the rights to the Bond movies. I still enjoy the genre of James Bond theme music sung by the attractive American singer Nancy Sinatra “You Only Live Twice”. Only in this case, it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had a double life. But I never thought of such entertainment movies as political propaganda that I had fallen for hook, line and non-thinker.

Solzhenitsyn became popular in America during the anti-communism era of the Cold War (1947’s to end of Soviet Union 1991) but continues today in popular culture and election propaganda. He was the icon of anti-Communism and won the Nobel Prize for his books supposedly revealing Soviet mass crimes. In 1978 Solzhenitsyn gave his famous “A World Split Apart” speech at Harvard University, the high temple of globalism. The Gulag Archipelago became part of the genre of anti-communist literature (see John Fleming, The Anticommunist Manifestos: Four Books that Caused the Cold War – 2009).

The purpose of the Cold War to British intelligence services was to keep the U.S. and Russia from aligning politically against Britain and for the U.S. Deep State of intelligence agencies to justify their bureaucratic existence. Solzhenitsyn portrayed himself a political prisoner of the communist totalitarian rule of Joseph Stalin and touted himself a non-court historian whistle blower. He didn’t need to be a paid intelligence operative, as American commercialism of his book was all that was needed. If the book sold, it must be truth seemed to be the advertising hook.

However, historians who have combed the Russian archives have found no records corroborating Solzhenitsyn’s reports of mass murder and undue oppression of prisoners in Russia’s Gulag prison system. One can retort that Stalin probably ordered the archives neutered of any such records. But the evidence for my thesis is derived from Solzhenitsyn’s wife’s statements in the New York Times, evidence that the Gulag death count came from the propaganda arm of British Intelligence, and massive newer evidence written by many historians, including RussiaGate.

More to the point, Solzhenitsyn’s stories about the mass crimes and genocide have never been validated.  This runs against British (underlined for emphasis) historian Robert Conquest’s famous 1968 book The Great Terror wherein he estimated the total number of deaths from Communist Gulag and purges could not have been less than 13 to 20 million people (see Nikos Mottas, Gulag Archipelago: Exposing the Anticommunist Fabrications of Solzhenitsyn, 2018). Conquest also estimated that Stalin can be blamed for 5 to 7 million deaths due to the Holodomor famine and drought in Ukraine in the 1930’s. The drying up and diversion of water from the Aral Sea followed unsustainable water management practices following British policies (source AI Yahoo.com).

Conquest criticized leftist intellectuals George Bernard Shaw, John-Paul Sartre, Walter Duranty, etc. for doubting his death statistics, accusing them of being “dupes” of Stalin. Conquest taunted his critics that his book should have been titled “I Told You So, You F___ing Fools”. But Conquest was a British Intelligence operative later made into a hero at Stanford University (a long-time recruiting hub for the CIA). May a Shakespearian plague strike both houses of propagandists.

In 1995, an investigative journalist pointed out that Conquest’s numbers were obtained from the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office of war propaganda (see Wikipedia and Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945-1953 (2004). In 1993, American historian J. Arch Getty also disagreed with Conquest on the basis that archive data did not support his figures (see Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence). Getty also challenged Stalin’s own justification of his Great Purge but said Stalin’s rule was “dictatorial but not totalitarian”.

Stalin was also faced with large numbers of foreign Bolshevik Communists in his prisons as well as army defectors who did not want to fight German Nazis. Stalin was not a nice person, but neither were the Bolsheviks, including Stalin’s opponent Trotsky who was a British agent (see Richard Poe, How the British Invented Communism and Blamed it on the Jews, 2024). Conquest’s book was sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

But Getty’s critical research about Conquest also failed to corroborate Zionist and leftist propagandist Hannah Arendt’s book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”. Arendt was a German émigré to the US who married a Communist and wrote the influential book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Before coming to America, she lectured in Britain, Stanford and went to Jerusalem for the Eichmann trial. She was a Zionist who blamed the inaction of the American bourgeoisie and working class for Nazism and the genocide in German camps. America lost over 400,000 soldiers in WWII, mostly working class.

In 2018 Professor Grover Furr of Montclair State University, New Jersey, additionally wrote a series of objective books refuting the anti-communist lies about the Moscow trials in the 1930’s and the lies about Stalin’s Soviet Communism (see Grover Furr, “Stalin…Waiting for the Truth: Exposing the Falsehoods in Stephen Kotkin’s ‘Stalin Waiting for Hitler”, 2019) and “Yezhov vs. Stalin: The Truth About Mass Repressions and the So-Called ‘Great Terror’ in the USSR”, 2018). Kotkin is an historian at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. The Gulag prisoners were mainly not political dissidents thrown into the Gulags without cause; they were mostly WWII military personnel who committed treason during wartime or were foreign Bolshevik or Trotskyite Communists. Solzhenitsyn was a mathematician and commander of an enemy coordinate location battery for artillery bombardment. But he openly wrote letters critical of Stalin and the war. Treason was also a way for Russian soldiers to cowardly dodge having to fight Hitler’s invading army.

It should be noted that the British invented Communism by subsidizing Karl Marx’s propaganda writings in London and then placed blame on the Jews (again see Richard Poe, How the British Invented Communism (and Blamed it on the Jews) 2024.

The amount of correction that an accurate interpretation of Solzhenitsyn’s books would require is almost impossible given decades of brainwashing by the CIA and Hollywood movies which portray Russia as the evil empire and Stalin as one of the evilest rulers. Tony Shaw’s 2007 book “Hollywood’s Cold War” detailed the collaboration between filmmakers and government in the production of anti-Russian propaganda. This was followed by J. Hoberman’s 2012 book “An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War”.

But perhaps the most effective book is Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism written by Joseph M. Thompson in 2024. Patriotism became a tool of anti-communist propaganda.  The description of the partnerships between the Pentagon and country music in Thompson’s book sounds more like how the CIA’s MK-Ultra program in the 1970’s created rock and roll music, sexual liberation, rampant drug usage, and encoded films designed to de-moralize youth and create a degenerate (marriage-less/childless) generation (see Joe Atwill, Manufacturing the Deadhead, 2014 and “Gregory Bateson and the Counter Culture”, 2015). MI-6 and the CIA made patriotism into anti-Communism that is prevalent today in America.

This is how effective propaganda works. But no Americans would believe anti-Communism is anti-American propaganda! Americans believe in simple dichotomies of good versus bad and propagandists exploit this to twist patriotism into an anti-Communist propaganda lie such as Solzhenitsyn’s overkill story about the Gulag (called “cognitive dissonance” by social psychologists).

The apparent biggest swallower of Solzhenitsyn’s self-serving Gulag propaganda is conservative, orthodox Christian columnist Rod Dreher, author of the book “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents” (2020). Ironically, Dreher champions resistance against totalitarianism by psychological manipulation in his book. Dreher admonishes his readers to “protect truth” without any awareness he has been duped by Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag “live not by lies” scam.

To be American and Christian is to be anti-Communist that is ingrained in Americans’ psyches. Evangelical Christians have a similar social psychological dilemma about Zionism. Evangelical Christianity was birthed in Britain in the late 1800’s, incubated in the Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles in the early 1900’s, and ended up the prevalent form of religion in the American South (see Sean Durbin, Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity and Myth in John Hagee’ Christians United for Israel, 2020). Seventy million American evangelical Christians currently support the Israeli War against Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza, as an apocalyptic “end times” war against Communism prophesied in the books of Revelations, Ezekial and Isaiah.

The Gulag Archipelago has become the “bible” of anti-communists, without apparent awareness that Solzhenitsyn was a phony anti-communist and deserter when it came to fighting greater evil. Hitler was planted by British bankers to bring about the downfall of Germany so that it would not align with Russia against Britain (see Guido Preparada, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich and Destroyed Europe, 2021).

But Dreher, evangelical Zionists and pro-Solzhenitsyn Leftist intellectuals are no worse than the person described earlier in this article (myself) who is a James Bond movie fan. British anti-communist propaganda is embedded everywhere. This is how successful propaganda operates; it becomes an indistinguishable and taken for granted part of the ether. It is not how some British novels like 1984, or A Brave New World describe it as manifestly cruel and totalitarian. In fact, those novels were themselves pseudo-propaganda meant to make you unconscious about real, insidious propaganda.

This article should not be misconstrued as some pro-Communist refutation of anti-Communist criticism against Joseph Stalin. Nor is it a defense of ‘useful idiots’ George Bernard Shaw, John-Paul Sartre and Walter Duranty for being Stalin’s dupes nor Hannah Arendt’s warped resentful anti-totalitarianism that scapegoated the American working class for war crimes. Nor is this a condemnation of Evangelical Christianity carte blanche. To repeat, everyone’s camp of propagandists and unconscious James Bond movie fans has been infected by the English Shakespearian plague of distorted anti-Communism. Truth has been murdered so many times by so many people taking their lines from the anti-Communist script written by British Intelligence that it is like the English Shakespearean play Titus Andronicus where there are fourteen murders as well as cannibalism and mutilations, that one can’t keep track.

In closing, another dot that perhaps needs connected is that the Gulag Archipelago was originally published by the YMCA Press in Paris, France. Sounds innocent, doesn’t it? The Young Men’s Christian Association was founded by George Williams in London in 1844 and the YMCA Press was coincidentally formed in Russia and moved to Paris. All roads lead to London including Solzhenitsyn’s, Robert Conquest’s and Stephen Kotkin’s books and all those Ian Fleming novels and movies. I rest my case.

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During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made a number of promises related to taxes. He pledged to eliminate taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security, and make car loan interest tax deductible. After he returned to the White House, Trump continued to say that there will be “no tax on Social Security benefits for seniors.”

In the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that President Trump signed into law on July 4, for tax years 2025 through 2028, qualified tips up to $25,000 are tax deductible, overtime pay (the “half” portion of “time-and-a-half” compensation) up to $12,500 ($25,000 for joint filers) is tax deductible, and interest on car loans up to $10,000 is tax deductible. However, these new tax deductions phase out for taxpayers with higher incomes.

Missing in the OBBBA is the elimination of taxes on Social Security.

Under current tax law, up to 50 percent of Social Security benefits are taxed on income between $25,000 and $34,000 ($32,000 and $44,000 for married filing jointly), and up to 85 percent of Social Security benefits are taxed if one’s income is over $34,000 ($44,000 for married filing jointly). For purposes of Social Security taxation, income is defined as adjusted gross income plus nontaxable interest plus half of Social Security benefits. Congress has never indexed for inflation the threshold at which benefits are subject to taxation.

The taxes on Social Security are all still in place. Yet, the Trump administration is claiming that the OBBBA “delivers on President Trump’s promise of No Tax on Social Security.”

So, how can the Trump administration make that claim? What really happened to no tax on Social Security benefits?

The OBBBA institutes, for tax years 2025 through 2028, “a new bonus deduction of $6,000 for seniors age 65 and older ($12,000 for married seniors).” This deduction “is on top of the standard deduction and the current-law additional deduction for seniors.” The standard deduction for tax year 2025 is $15,000 ($30,000 for married filing jointly) and the senior deduction is $2,000 ($3,200 for married filing jointly). The new senior bonus deduction phases out at a 6 percent rate for taxpayers with modified adjusted gross income over $75,000 ($150,000 for married filing jointly).

According to the Trump administration,

The new $6,000 senior deduction is estimated to benefit 33.9 million seniors, including seniors not claiming Social Security. The deduction yields an average increase in after-tax income of $670 per senior who benefits from it.

51.4 million seniors — 88% of all seniors receiving Social Security income — will pay no tax on their Social Security.

This amounts to the largest tax break in American history for our nation’s seniors.

Since taxes on Social Security are a funding source for the program, the OBBBA, which was a budget reconciliation bill, cannot recommend changes to Social Security.

So, although Trump’s big beautiful bill does not eliminate taxes on Social Security, it does provide a temporary new deduction that will lower the taxable income of seniors and therefore lower their adjusted gross income that their income tax is figured on.

So, what should Congress do? Should taxes on Social Security actually be eliminated? Of course they should, but not because they are taxes on Social Security.

Most Americans who pay taxes are quadruple-taxed on their income in addition to all of the other taxes they have to pay. There is income tax, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, and, in over 40 states, there is state income tax. All of these taxes are on the same income.

High-income taxpayers are hit even harder. For taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes over $200,000 ($250,000 for married filing jointly), there is the additional Medicare tax of .9 percent and the additional 3.8 percent surtax on net investment income. Certain tax deductions and credits begin to be phased-out as one’s income rises, resulting in the payment of higher taxes. There is also the estate tax.

Then there are federal excise taxes on fuel, airline tickets, tobacco, alcoholic beverages, firearms, ammunition, and indoor tanning services. And finally, as explained above, Social Security benefits may be subject to taxation.

So, yes, of course, taxes on Social Security should be eliminated, but only because excise taxes, payroll taxes, estate taxes, and income taxes should be eliminated. None of these taxes are necessary for the government to carry out its constitutional functions.

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