Aggregatore di feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unz: Corrected.

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

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

Unz: Corrected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

The post Fact-Checking appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

Every society / economy is a distribution mechanism that distributes:

1. Gains

2. Losses

3. Risk

4. The costs of securing the sources of gains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tactics of using “Shahids” are also changing.

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

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

Number of Shahed drones launched against Ukraine

bigger

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

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

Ammunition for Patriot air defenses are running out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These reports border on being laughable (archived):

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

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

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

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

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

It shows how ridiculous claims like these are:

bigger

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

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

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

A Ukrainian soldier describes the consequences (machine translation):

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post The War on Us appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

Production and Demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We know how that worked out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published on Racket News.

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

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

What is The Great Taking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mechanism of Financial Control

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

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Église Catholique en France,

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

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

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

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

Read the Whole Article

The post Gen Z Finds Meaning in Traditional Religion appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

Scott Bessent in the Oval Office:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Index of US Manufacturing Unit Labor Costs Since 2010

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

Reprinted with permission from David Stockton’s Contra Corner.

The post More Trumpian Tariff Hallucinosis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

GBH News

The post In extremely rare move, Harvard revokes tenure and cuts ties with star business professor appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

Ungrounded

Photographs Expose Thomas Merton Murder Cover-up – CovertAction Magazine

The post Thomas Merton, “Ungrounded” appeared first on LewRockwell.

Follow Robert Barnes at:

https://sportspicks.locals.com/

https://vivabarneslaw.locals.com/

https://1776lawcenter.com

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

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

____________________________________________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gli Stati Uniti sono il nemico perfetto per il regime cinese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L'obiettivo finale di Xi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epoch Times ha contattato la Casa Bianca per un commento.

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

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

Due mesi dopo sarebbe scoppiata la “pandemia”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una “mancia” in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

Thanks, John Smith. 

AP News

The post Israel’s use of human shields in Gaza is widespread, sources say appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Drop Site

The post Microsoft Bans the Word “Palestine” in Internal Emails appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin.

The Unz Review

The post Homage to Forrestal appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Ludwig von Mises on Peace and Social Cooperation appeared first on LewRockwell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dylan sings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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

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

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

What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The US Army, its Finances and Operations; Sergeants in Charge. appeared first on LewRockwell.