Aggregatore di feed

This article might offend everybody, but the links here are to the sources, and all of its sources are not only authentic when they are primary, but are true when they are secondary. (I have checked-out all sources within each secondary source that I link to.) Individuals who disagree with something here but don’t click onto the link to the documentation when they disagree, are not open-minded; and, for me, the first obligation is to be constantly open-minded, because only in that way can truths be discovered, and falsehoods become identified and replaced with truths. So: I open here by admitting that I am not bothered, at all, if I lose a closed-minded reader. I don’t want them, though I find that a majority of people are closed-minded. I instead look for readers who are (like I am): always seeking evidence to change one’s view of things whenever that view is false.

That is the Introduction.

——

The most pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian countries — America and its European colonies — are so blind to the evilness of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the residents of Gaza, and of its ongoing and accelerating land-thefts from the Palestinians in the West Bank, as to present the serious question of why these massive ongoing evils, which are of historic magnitude, are absent from their Governments’ official condemnations and (until recently) almost completely absent from these countries’ news-reports, even as-if these horrors weren’t being perpetrated by Israel with America’s weapons and satellite guidance and targeting, or weren’t even happening at all. There is a real blindness about the blindness, as if this tolerance of Israel’s (and America’s) genocide and land-theft against Palestinians simply were not so. But it is. What explains the blindness and the blindness about the blindness — the utter refusal — to acknowledge the evilness of Israel (and of the U.S. Government ever since Harry Truman created the state of Israel in 1948, even when the genocidal intent of Israel’s founders was already known both privately and publicly)?

Stupidity — believing the Israeli Government’s lies — is part of the answer. Especially the lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew is obvious to everyone but idiots, because many Jews are anti-Israel — even some rabbis, both in America and in Israel, are against Israel — and this means that the equation between “Jew” and “Zionist” (supporter of Israel) is false. Only stupid people would believe it. Nonetheless, the Trump Administration and many throughout the world spout Israel’s lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew (an “anti-Semite”); and, for example, prestigious American universities have expelled students for speaking publicly against Israel’s slaughter of Gazans — and the U.S. Government, despite the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (which prohibits the Government’s suppressing public expressions of political opinions), has halted federal funds to universities that DON’T expel such students.

However, even the opponents of that lie falsify, by alleging that the Jewish religion does not support this ethnic cleansing and genocide. Here are a few examples from the Jewish religion’s alleged ‘holy texts’ or Scriptures, specifically referring to what their ‘God’ wants:

Genesis 15:18-21

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”

Deuteronomy 7:16

“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

“When you capture cities in the land he Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”

Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. America’s Government says it doesn’t like what Israel is doing, but nonetheless continues to provide almost all of the weaponry and satellite intelligence in order to do it, and is therefore co-equal with Israel in doing this genocide, but (since America pretends to be not a theocratic nation [and our Constitution is entirely secular, so anything at all theocratic in the U.S. Government would actually be traitorous], and not even an aristocratic nation, but instead a democratic nation — though it now IS actually an aristocratic nation, a nation ruled by billionaires instead of by mere voters) alleges that it isn’t participating in the genocide. That allegation by the U.S. Government is clearly a lie.

Israel, therefore, does represent Judaism’s mythological god by doing to the Gazans what it is doing to them, and also doing to Palestinians in the West Bank what it is doing to them. Self-alleged Jews — including some rabbis — who say otherwise (that Judaism isn’t intrinsically racist and even genocidally so), are clearly lying about the Jewish religion, by saying that being a follower of the Jewish religion does NOT necessarily entail being a Zionist. Though Zionism, as a political movement, started only with Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish Nation in 1896, Zionism had been an intrinsic part of the Jewish faith ever since that faith’s Scripture, the Torah, which includes those passages, which Israel is now trying to finalize in both Gaza and the West Bank (and a bit beyond), which Scripture became Judaism’s Torah, or ultimate holy Scripture, at some time during the 6th-5th Century BC. Since that time, every Jewish assembly place or synagogue has had a Torah. It is the basis of the Jewish religion, and before that, Jews were simply tribes.

Judaism’s hatred of, and desire to destroy, the Palestinians is as old as the faith itself. For this reason, as I headlined on 14 August 2017, “Netanyahu’s Pro-Nazi Lie: ‘Hitler Wanted To Expel The Jews’”: Netanyahu blamed Palestinians — NOT Christians — for the Holocaust. Despite Hitler himself having been a Catholic, and that Church having held a solemn private (but attended by Bormann and Goebbels) Memorial Mass for him, on 6 May 1945, a week after his suicide. Hitler was born, lived, and died, as a Catholic.

However, there is nothing unique about Judaism’s racism. Consider, for example, the Christians, not just Hitler but all of the Nazi leaders, and the 94% of Germans in that time who called themselves “Christian”:

The Catholic-raised Hitler took very seriously such anti-Semitic New-Testament statements as, from ‘Jesus,’ John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and Luke 19:27; and from Paul, 1 Thes. 2:14-16. (Hitler even said to his followers on 18 December 1926, “The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the battle against the Jews as the enemy of Mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish.” Then, on 26 April 1933, he told the Pope’s representative, “I am doing what the Church has done for 1,500 years. I am simply finishing the job.”) All of that was Christian racism against Jews. Furthermore, virtually all of Germany’s Nazis were Christians — committed to the New Testament — and, in fact, that (an applicant’s purebred Christianity) was a requirement in order to join the Party, and ESPECIALLY in order to join the SS, as is documented in a 13,000-word masterpiece of an article by Coel Hellier, on “Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism”, which can leave no intelligent reader to doubt that the Nazi Party was itself a Christian movement, which historical fact is covered-up by ‘journalists’ and ‘historians’ (but exposed and documented by the primary sources cited in that article — they’re all authentic).

In addition to this: On 21 October 1941, Hitler, in the privacy of his bunker, concluded a long tirade against Jews (as transcribed in his Table-Talk) by saying: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” Hitler’s buddy, Himmler, stated, in a speech to top SS leaders, two years later, when the Holocaust was in full swing, on 4 October 1943, that this extermination was necessary for them to carry out, in order to have “exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.” Hitler had stated, on various occasions, that the “Jewish infection” or “Jewish bacterium” or “blood-poisoning by Jews,” was transmitted to non-Jews in their “blood,” and so Jews must be entirely eradicated like plague-carrying rats — not only in Germany, but beyond. Hitler said, on 24 February 1943: “This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan [which to him meant the descendants of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 — and the snake was, according to the NT, the father of the Jews] but with the extermination of the Jew [which to him meant the descendants of the snake in Genesis 3] in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people.” (Yet,still, there are Holocaust-deniers who say that it is just ‘a Jewish hoax’, or that if it happened, Hitler didn’t know about it.) Or, as Hitler stated it in his last official words, his “Political Testament” right before his suicide: “Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.” (His phrase “international Jewry” referred to Jews in all nations. He didn’t make any explicit reference here to exterminating them, because this statement from him was intended to be public — not merely private.)

Furthermore, that 24 February 1943 quotation ISN’T from the flawed Trevor-Roper publication of the Table-Talk but instead from an authentic speech that Hitler gave on that date, and the varying translations of which were discussed in an 8 March 1943 OSS Memorandum http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/thepursuitofthenazimind/FDR/DSCN2002.jpg by Walter Langer to William Donovan. The 1941 quotation from Hitler isn’t only in the original German version of the Table-Talk but was quoted in a book by Winston Churchill in 1948, four years before any translated version of the Table-Talks (Tischgesprache) (and this includes the one issued by Trevor-Roper) was published. The Himmler quotation is likewise accepted as authentic by historians.

Moreover, Horst von Maltitz perceptively observed in this regard in his excellent 1973 The Evolution of Hitler’s Germany (p. 171), that “railroad transport trains carrying Jews from the West to extermination camps in Poland were given priority over trains for urgently needed troops and war supplies. Moreover, skilled Jewish laborers, desperately needed in the munitions plants in occupied Poland, were carted off to extermination centers, in spite of strong objections by plant managers.” And, according to the Polish Ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski, in his 1947 Defeat in Victory (p. 179), he had personally handed U.S. President Roosevelt in the White House on 28 July 1943 a memo that, “The unprecedented destruction of the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany’s military requirements. Hitler and his subordinates aim at the total destruction of the Jews before the war ends and regardless of its outcome.”

And, as I pointed out in my 2000 WHY the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause & Scholarly Cover-Up (see summary of it here), Hitler said that “Aryans” have remained unchanged since the time God first created Man (Adam and Eve). Thus, Mein Kampf asserted that the objective was “to give the Almighty Creator beings as He Himself created them.” Though during his later years Hitler was trying to adopt a scientific view, he failed, and Hitler even in his war bunker on the night of 25 January 1942, confided that Darwinian evolution does not apply to Man, who “has always been as he is now.” This was NOT an atheistic type of racism; it was SPECIFICALLY Biblical, a religious type of racism, despite all of the propaganda to the contrary (which has fooled almost all of the Hitler ‘experts’ ever since — though the evidence proves the contrry to be true).

Consequently, it will be good here to quote the most important New Testament origins of Hitler’s — and other Christians’ — Holocaust:

John 8:44

“You are the children of your father, the Devil, and you want to follow your father’s desires. From the very beginning, he was a murderer, and has never been on the side of truth, becuse there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he is only doing what is natural to him, because he is a liar and the father of all lies.”

Matthew 23:31-38

“So, you actually admit that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets! Go on, then, and finish up what your ancestors started. You snakes and sons of snakes! How do you expect to escape being condemned to hell? And so I will tell you that I will send you prophets and wise men and teachers; you will kill some of them, crucify others, and whip others in the synagogues and chase them from town too town. As a result, the punishement for the murder of all innocent men will fall on you. … The punishment for all of these murders will fall on the people of this day!”

Luke: 19:27

“Now, as for all those enemies of mine who did not want me to be their king, bring them here, and kill them in my presence!” (This is told as the closing line of a parable.)

Paul 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

“You suffered the same persecutions from your own countrymen that they suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us. How displeasing they are to God! How hostile they are to everyone! They even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation. In this way, they have completed the full total of the sins they have always committed. And now God’s anger has at last come down on them!”

To put those passages into their true historical context: Paul never met nor heard the living Jesus but wrote the earliest of all documents that came to be canonized in the year 393 by the Roman Catholic Church and later by all other Christian churches; and his followers wrote the four canonical Gospel-accounts of ‘the words of Jesus’ but even in their time Jesus’s having been a rabbi who preached Judaism (NOT Christianity) was so well known so that 3 out of the 4 canonized Gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ mentioned specifically that his disciples sometimes addressed him simply as “rebbi” rabbi: Matthew 23:7, 23:8, 26:25, 26:49; Mark 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; and John 1:38, 1:49, 3:2, 3:26, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, and 11:8. They could not deny it, because to have tried would have been too obviously false and thus Paul’s new religion would have been recognized for what it actually was, not as they wanted it to become — they were evangelists for Paul’s religion, which they believed to be true because Paul told them that it was.

As I documented in my 2012 CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS, Paul created Christianity in the year 49 0r 50 in order to get back at Jesus’s brother James who then headed the former Jesus-created sect of Jews and finally decided that the by-then thousands of uncircumcised men in Paul’s congregations would either be circumcised in accord with Genesis 17:14 or else be expelled from the sect. That is the reason why Christianity is anti-Jewish (anti-Semitic): James finally decided to enforce Genesis 17:14 (in that age when no such things as anesthetics nor antibiotics existed — and circumcision was therefore almost always perpetrated upon only infants, who didn’t volunteer for it and whose screams adults didn’t take seriously).

As regards the Christian clergy, they very predominantly supported Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and they even provided to his Government the documentation as to whom was and therefore also whom was NOT a Christian — the basic data from which the Holocaust’s “Jews” would be selected for extermination:

Eberhard Bethge, who had been a liberal Protestant cleric during the Third Reich, was interviewed in the last chapter of Augustin Hedberg’s 1992 FAITH UNDER FIRE and was asked what those years had been like. Bethge commented, “‘Bad blood’ was the great term. You had to have Aryan blood.” Hitler, in only his private statements, had defined “Aryan,” as pureblooded Christian. Bethge’s interviewer inquired, “So we know this Jewish poison [Jewish blood] had to be cleansed. How did they propose to do that?” Bethge replied, tellingly: “For instance, everybody in an office, in a village, in a city, in a province, in Berlin, had to prove that he had [only] Aryan ancestors. How could he do that? He could do it only if he wrote to church officers in the villages or in the cities and asked them to look in the old books of the church in which baptisms were recorded. So many pastors and church secretaries had to work for hours and hours, weeks and months to answer all these requests. ‘Please give me an excerpt out of the church files that proves my ancestors had been Christians.’ The church officers and the ministers, they didn’t care. They did that. They said, ‘How important we are now.’ I was an assistant curator in the winter of ’33. I had to sit all morning and look through the books and answer these letters.” It was therefore the Christian clergy themselves — people indoctrinated with John 8:44, and Matthew 27:25, and Matthew 23:31-36, and Luke 19:27, etc. — who were the proud implementers of the indispensable first step in the Nazis’ 12-year-long “racist” war against the Jews, by supplying the crucial raw data for segregating-out Jews. Bethge was even honest enough to admit, “We were anti-Semitic, and we thought this was Christian.” (Of course, they did, because it was, and they had absorbed this from Christianity’s Scripture.) The essential first step in the “final solution” was this identification of who was NOT an “Aryan,” who WAS “a Jew.” Hitler commanded this first step in the year he came into power, 1933, and the Christian clergy executed it with pride. And yet even today, so-called “historians” say that Hitler didn’t have execution of the Jews in mind from the very start, and that Hitler was no Christian, and so forth.

“Historians” have not been doing their job, for the truth. That’s why the general public cannot separate propaganda from history — the latter is just an extension of the former. Compare this account of the origin off how the Nazis managed to identify who was “a Jew” and who was not, that was given in a traditional history book on that topic, Edwin Black’s 2001 IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST. Christianity’s role is ignored.

So: Zionists such as Netanyahu can’t blame Christianity for the Holocaust; they need Christian believers to blame Palestinians instead — people who had nothing to do with it — this was instead a Christian operation.. The historical truth and context behind 7 October 2023 needs to be, and has effectively been, hidden from the publics in America, and in its European colonies.

So: Zionists such as Netanyahu can’t blame Christianity for the Holocaust; they need Christian believers to blame Palestinians instead — people who had nothing to do with it — this was instead a Christian operation.. The historical truth and context behind 7 October 2023 needs to be, and has effectively been, hidden from the publics in America, and in its European colonies.

There is a Big Lie, and, this time, it comes not from Germany’s racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist (or ideologically nazi) Nazi Party and all the rest of Christendom, but instead from Judaism’s own racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist Zionists and all the rest of Judaism.

And what about Islam’s equivalent? That is the jihadists, the fundamentalist Arab Sunni (U.S. propaganda lies that it’s instead fundamentalist Iranian Shiite) movement that includes both al-Qaeda and ISIS and whose former leader in Iraq and Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, Donald Trump made a deal with on May 14th for Syria to become a U.S. colony, now that this former al-Qaeda and then ISIS leader, whom both Obama and Biden, and also Trump, had protected ever since 2012, finally succeeded (with U.S.-supplied weapons and training) at overthrowing Syria’s secular President Bashar al-Assad, and started the ethnic cleansing in Syria against Shiite Muslims and Christians there (that isn’t being reported in the U.S. empire).

This article was originally published on Eric’s Substack.

The post The Truth About The Jews, The Christians, and The Palestinians appeared first on LewRockwell.

Total government spending in the American Colonies took away just 1% to 2% of GDP. In the USA through 1913, apart from during major wars, spending took away just 3% to 8% of GNP. Now, spending takes away 43% of GDP.

National-government regulations alone now take away another 8% of GDP.

The quantity of money was inflated by congressmen and presidents using their new Fed throughout the 1920s, causing the 1929–1945 Great Depression. Double that money inflation caused the 1970s Great Inflation, and a roughly-comparable amount caused the 2007 Financial Crisis. Doubling those latter amounts, the money inflation from August 2008 to April 2022 was 303%. The covid portion alone, 120%, was of the same order of magnitude as the money inflation that had caused each of those previous crises. And like their predecessors’ hyperactivity kept all those previous crises going, current congressmen and presidents are keeping their money inflation going now.

The national-government debt is now 123% of GDP, and politicians keep adding more. But what can’t continue forever, won’t. Already, attracting treasury-bond buyers to even the existing debt is requiring increasingly-higher interest rates.

The root cause of all of this despotism has been simple enough: both major parties have been majority big-government Progressive since 1894. Both parties’ despotic legislators have grabbed executive powers, and both parties’ despotic executives have let them.

Legislators Grab Executive Powers

Despotic legislators have grabbed the executive power to allocate line-item budgets.

They have delegated their legislative power to regulate. They have then grabbed even the resulting illegitimate executive power, by controlling the regulators, through line-item appropriations, and through oversight other than summary impeachment.

In their various oversight actions, despotic legislators have relentlessly grabbed the executive power to control how to enforce the laws: the executive powers to organize departments, to control who gets hired and who can be fired or let go, and to control even what processes the executives must follow—even dictating minute details that executives must report to the legislators.

When legislators grab executive power, they unconstitutionally combine powers. Once combined, these powers can’t offset and limit each other. Without such limiting to serve as sanctions, there is no force compelling government people to follow the Constitution’s good rules.

As plural executives, legislators are unaccountable. They leave burdensome unconstitutional statutes in place and keep adding to the burden. Meanwhile most of all, session after session, they logroll: they divvy out favors, to get cronies’ donations, to broadcast false or deceptive sales pitches, to get reelected.

Some Representatives Start Supporting the Constitution

In state legislatures and to a lesser extent in the national legislature, freedom-caucus members are beginning to bring government-limiting bills up for recorded votes. Sometimes this leads their crony-backed opponents in their own party to vote for freedom. More often so far, this creates clear voting records, and freedom-caucus members then inform voters about opponents’ bad votes to primary and defeat heavily crony-funded opponents.

Legislative blocs grow more slowly than executives can get elected, so executives are already showing how to limit governments. Recent and present state attorney generals, for example Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and Missouri’s Eric Schmitt and Andrew Bailey, and one governor so far, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, have been unprecedentedly using their powers against other government jurisdictions. Under a different constitution, Argentina president Javier Milei has rapidly chainsawed his government by 30%.

Caucuses can make greater strides in limiting governments by tightening caucus membership rules. Voters can take matters into their own hands by never voting for any national or state legislator whose latest-term Freedom Index is—or, going forward, likely could be—below 80%.

Activists, media, voters, and politicians can make the greatest strides if they understand which specific actions support the Constitution best.

Rules-and-Sanctions Boundary Must Get Respected and Enforced

When legislators first start limiting governments in earnest, they must do this by shifting to just two main actions.

First, they must quickly pass a single overall-total appropriation. It must no longer be a minutely-detailed shopping list, every item of which they claim that executives must fully spend, in the exact amount they dictate in their list. Instead, their single total appropriation must be a required constitutional check on executives’ power.

Second, legislators must pass bills that if enacted will be constitutional. Their highest priority must be to pass repeals of the many existing statutes that are unconstitutional because these statutes fail at least one of the following simple pass/fail tests:

• No misleading parts.
• Only uses powers enumerated for the national government.
• No delegation of legislative power.
• No grabs of executive power.
• No grabs of judicial power.
• Not noncritical, complex, or long, and not helping make the total corpus of law incomprehensibly complex or long.

By quickly passing a single total appropriation and then repealing unconstitutional statutes, legislators must start limiting themselves. Executives must also start limiting legislators.

Executives must use their executive powers to organize departments, allocate budgets within the legislator-passed overall-total appropriation, hire, lay off or fire, control work processes, and manage all officers who aren’t empowered and managed through processes explicitly specified in the Constitution.

If legislators then impeach and remove an executive for doing this, succeeding executives must simply do the same. Voters will keep electing such Constitution-protecting executives, and voters will replace such despotic legislators.

Statutes that are constitutional as shown by the simple tests above will consist solely of rules and sanctions that apply to all persons. They won’t specify any enforcement actions that executives must take.

Legislators and executives must hold legislators to passing bills that if enacted into statutes will be constitutional. Executives must step up and choose for themselves every action they take to enforce the resulting constitutional statutes, similar treaties, and judicial opinions.

Within each government jurisdiction, limiting legislators to passing rules and sanctions is the fundamental process boundary.

Violating this boundary is despotism. Securing this boundary will greatly advance freedom.

The post Rules and Sanctions: Boundary between Freedom and Despotism appeared first on LewRockwell.

From the Tom Woods Letter:

I know there are more important things in the world, but sometimes you get a bee in your bonnet and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Mine is an email I received from Harvard this weekend.

In particular, it was an invitation for me to visit Adams House, my upperclass house, after years of renovations.

A little background: before Harvard made the dumb decision to assign students randomly to the various upperclass houses, you used to be able to submit your preferences. The result was that students sorted themselves according to their interests and personalities: Kirkland House was for the jocks, Eliot House for the snobs, and Adams House for, wait for it…

…the artsy people.

You know, just like ol’ Woods here!

Never in a million years would I have chosen Adams House, but that’s where I was assigned, oddly enough in one of the last years students were allowed to submit their preferences.

“Poetic justice!” proclaimed my leftist friend in my freshman dorm.

I came to make my peace with Adams House, though, and I even became friendly with Professor Robert Kiely, who was the “house master” (a faculty member who lived in and lightly oversaw the administration of an upperclass house).

Well, in this weekend’s email, beneath the signatures of the new house masters was the ugly title “faculty dean,” followed by “formerly house master.”

And I thought: don’t tell me. They decided “house master” sounded too much like it involved slavery.

Bingo.

I remember having thought the title “house master” was pretty neat, actually.

Apparently the change was made back in 2016 because, according to the Harvard Crimson, some house leaders “noted that the term ‘master’ could be associated with slavery.”

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith admitted at the time that there was no connection between the term and slavery (though of course anyone with an IQ above 70 already knew that): “I have not been shown any direct connection between the term House Master and the institution of slavery.”

He likewise acknowledged that alumni were likely to continue to use the older term and insisted that “they should have no qualms in doing so. The term House Master is and will remain a part of the College’s long and proud history.”

These are the pretzels you have to twist yourself into while simultaneously trying on the one hand to appease crazy people and emotional hypochondriacs, while on the other hand maintaining at least a tenuous connection to reality.

I for one think the changes did not go far enough.

Perhaps the college should no longer use the term “fork” to refer to a utensil. Such terminology could remind people of “forks in the road,” which could in turn trigger them with reminders of difficult decisions.

I propose “scoop buddy” as a suitably anodyne replacement.

Tables, too, might trigger our delicate flowers, perhaps reminding them of “turning the tables,” a phrase tied to conflict or betrayal, or medieval torture devices like the rack, which were vaguely table-like.

Instead, I propose “flat gathering surface.”

Can we devise enough neologisms to satisfy the perpetually aggrieved?

Never pay for a book again: TomsFreeBooks.com

The post They Just Stole Another Word From Us appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the Romantic poet John Keats’ tombstone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome are these words, which he chose: “HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.”

His name is not there, by choice. Keats was twenty-five when he died. In Ode to Psyche he wrote:

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same.

On the American writer James Agee’s burial stone in an isolated wooded spot off a dirt road in upstate New York, there are no words, although I like to think Keats’ poetic words seem appropriate to the sylvan nature of the spot and the bird song that filled the air in praise when I and my wife “trespassed” onto land that once meant so much to Agee, and where the house he once sought refuge in lies dilapidated and mute.

I read somewhere that he wished that a bird would be carved into the stone under which he was placed, but it is absent. Perhaps a phoenix, that symbol of the triumph of life over death and immortality, so dear to D.H. Lawrence. Maybe it, like him, flew away, and maybe a young man like Keats, who died so long before him, could conjure winged words of praise – doves of the spirit – for a man who would come long after him, nearly a century and a half after, because he sensed a connection that he could send flying into the future. Like Emily Dickinson, he knew hope was a thing with feathers, and the bird of time has no limits when it is released from the sentence. Time? Not a magazine where Agee once worked – but the real mystery and obsession of true artists. Time, death, and the fact that love brought us into existence. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” wrote Keats.

Keats and Agee were pilgrims, and Agee no doubt would agree with Keats’ words that “this life is a vale of soul-making.”

Many people visit Keats’ and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s graves in the Roman cemetery; few ever have or will pay homage to Agee over the boulder that marks the spot where his body was placed after he died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five in a NYC taxi on May 16, 1955, seventy years ago. He has largely been forgotten. If you are reading this, you may have no idea who he was and why I am writing this. I will tell you.

I am writing this because I have felt a connection to him since I was a young man, not just to his talent, but his passionate soul, beautiful writing, the religious quality of his strivings, his faith and doubt, and his sense of wonder and reverence before the mystery of existence. His deep moral outrage at the suffering forced on the poor by the rich is close to my heart, and the desperate way he threw himself into life, always aware since the age of six when his father died in an automobile accident that death shadows our every move on our short visits through life. All his work is filled with the sense of the mysterious nature of existence as described by Einstein:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Agee’s eyes were always wide-open; he saw through them the hope and hopelessness that battle in every heart.

I am a minor writer whose work is essentially ignored, which I understand but wish wasn’t so. But I know also that recognition is not why I write; I do it because it is my effort at soul-making, which is as much a restorative endeavor as a prospective one.  Agee wrote for his soul. Years ago he grasped my ironically young-old mind when he wrote:

Now as awareness of how much life is lost, and how little is left, becomes ever more piercing, I feel also, ever more urgently, the desire to restore, and to make a little less permanent, such of my lost life as I can, beginning with the beginning and coming far forward as need be. This is the simplest, most primitive of the desires which can move a writer. I hope I shall come to other things in time; in time to write them. Before I do, if I am ever to do so, I must sufficiently satisfy this first, most childlike need.

We are all little lost children at heart, disguised to ourselves as adults, doing what we do to find the natural piety that Wordsworth said was “the Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star.” When the living ignore my work, I often shamefully respond like a hurt child, but it is just a small step to the realization that Agee and Keats shared, that we will all be forgotten in due time, that we are bubbles on the great stream, and recognition is a fool’s dream. Fugitives from our true vocations, we often engage in endless imitation, something Agee never did. To say he was true to his life’s star is to say he was never a copy but always an original.

He was the author of the posthumously acclaimed (but failure in his lifetime) classic account of dirt-poor Alabama tenant farmer families during the Depression, with searing photographs by Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (the Foreword begins on page 75), the posthumously published Pulitzer Prize winning beautiful autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, film scripts for The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), and unique film reviews for Time and The Nation magazines, among other works. Agee, a poet at heart, was acutely aware that he, and all of us over time, will be forgotten, but while the thought is upon me – before I too am extinguished like a brief spark on a chimney wall – of how powerful a writer he was and how full of moral passion his yearnings and how beautiful his prose, let me offer this long quote from an undated fragment he wrote for use in his rapturously sad A Death in the Family, a novel based on the six year-old Agee’s reaction to his father’s death in an automobile accident near their home in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1915:

Those who have gone before, backward beyond remembrance and beyond the beginning of imagination, backward among the emergent beasts, and the blind, prescient ravenings of the youngest sea, those children of the sun, I mean, who brought forth those, who wove, spread the human net, and who brought forth me; they are fallen backward into their graves like blown wheat and are folded under the earth like babies in blankets, and they are all melted upon the mute enduring world like leaves, like wet snow; they are faint in the urgencies of my small being as stars at noon; they people the silence of my soul like bats in a cave; they lived, in their time, as I live now, each a universe within which, for a while, to die was inconceivable, and their living was as bright and brief as sparks on a chimney wall, and now they lie dead, as I soon shall lie; my ancestors, my veterans. I call upon you, I invoke your help, you cannot answer, you cannot help; I desire to do you honor, you are beyond the last humiliation. You are my fathers and my mothers but there is no way in which you can help me, nor may I serve you. You are the old people and now you rest. Rest well; I will be with you soon; meanwhile may I bear you ever in the piety of my heart.

Piety has become a lost virtue (from Latin pietatem (nominative pietas) dutiful conduct, sense of duty; religiousness, piety; loyalty, patriotism; faithfulness to natural ties), as have so many others such as honor, courage, truthfulness, etc. Agee was no exemplar of every virtue, but in that he was like all of us, frail and flawed, but his audacious courage in his writing was his way to redeem his child’s soul by never holding back like so many writers do. He always drew on what was deep and true in his experience, especially the lacerating wound he suffered when his father died. That preoccupation, that youthful revelation, that presence of an absence, that hole in his heart, that death at an early age, joined to his youthful Christian devoutness and doubt, can be seen in everything he wrote.

That he came to think his ancestors could not help him was mistaken, I would say; for the bridge over the river between life and death, across the rivers Acheron and Styx, which separate the worlds of the living and the dead in Greek Mythology, runs two ways when one trusts the heart not the head. Agee, like Aeneas whom Virgil so often describes as pius in the Aeneid, was essentially a man of the heart, a rough Tennessean schooled at Harvard and in the sophisticated secular precincts of New York City where he may have turned a bit away from his youthful faithful heart under the strain of the heart attacks that killed him and the ideology of that “sophisticated” culture.

Like Agee’s father, my wife’s father died in a single car crash on a bridge at night when she was two months old. I have seen how that presence of his absence – the father that she never knew and her family’s reaction to his death: silence – affected her. Her courage in facing it inspires me. Agee, at least, had the father he loved dearly for six years, so the absence of his presence was different but similar. Who can say which was worse, the loss of presence or a lifelong absence?

When I was five years old, my mother, nine months pregnant, went to the hospital to give birth to another sibling (there were five of us already), and we were all very excited. Something happened; the baby was stillborn. When my father took me to the hospital to see my mother, I was not allowed in, but the figure of her sad face waving to me from the window on the second floor has stayed with me across the years. When I was ten years-old, my six year-old cousin accidentally shot and killed his eight year-old brother with a rifle that was hidden under a bed in a neighbor’s home. There is more, and no doubt many people have such stories to tell, but I offer these examples to reveal some of the impulses for my writing this essay about James Agee, just as one can explore the reasons behind Agee’s writing and behavior, or that of all the actions of those who never wrote a word but were marked by death in their tender years. For some, tragedy elicits words; for others, the mystery renders them mute.

Being a master of the English language and a writer from an early age with music in his words, Agee tells us at the end of his book, The Morning Watch, that when he (Richard in the book) was twelve years-old at a religious boarding school on Good Friday, feeling a new, heavy, “cold, crushing sorrow” at the thought of Jesus’s suffering, he saw hogs devour a wounded snake and felt such horror and pity, that he said to himself that:

. . . he was so far gone by now that there must be a way beyond really feeling anything, ever any more (the phrase jumped at him): (Who had said that? His mother. ‘Daddy was terribly hurt so God has taken him up to heaven to be with Him and he won’t come back to us every any more.’) ‘Ever any more,’ he heard his quiet voice repeat within him; and within the next moment he ceased to think of the snake with much pain.

Agee was such a deep feeling writer that it was impossible for him to get beyond really feeling anything, ever any more. Some critics have accused him of being too emotional and also of never having fulfilled his promise. In a luminous memoir, his good friend, Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator of the Odyssey and the Aeneid, puts that canard to rest:

Quite contrary to what has been said about him, he amply fulfilled his promise. In one of his first sonnets he said, of his kin, his people

‘Tis mine to touch with deathless their clay,
And I shall fail, and join those I betray.

In respect to that commission, who thinks there was any failure or betrayal?

As for those poor tenant farmer families that he praised in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – the book that started with a commission from Fortune magazine where he was working in the 1930s to write an article that Fortune never published – Agee began it thus:

I spoke of this piece of work we were doing as ‘curious.’ It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’ (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money, and for a reputation for crusading and for unbias which, when skillfully enough qualified, is exchangeable at any bank for money (and in politics for votes, job patronage, abelincolnism, etc.’); and that these people could be capable of meditating this prospect without the slightest doubt of their qualifications to do an ‘honest’ piece of work and with a conscience better than clear, and in the virtual certitude of almost unanimous public approval. . . . And it seems curious still further that, with all their suspicion , save only for the tenants and themselves, and their own intentions, and with all their realization of the seriousness and mystery of the subject, and of the human responsibility they undertook, they so little questioned or doubted their own qualifications for this work.

All of this, I repeat, seems to me curious, obscene, terrifying, and unfathomably mysterious.

Those are the words of a man who didn’t mince words.

So let us now join with him in praising these famous men and all like them who struggle to eke out a living against the predations of the wealthy hyenas with smiling faces whose fortunes are built on the backs of working people.

And let me now praise James Rufus Agee who died on this day, May16, 1955. He spoke for the human family, that one death was everyone’s, and as Wordsworth put it, we should give thanks for his life and give

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

May James Agee speak to us still, if only we would listen.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Let Me Now Praise James Agee appeared first on LewRockwell.

PARIS – The UN’s Under-Secretary-General just warned that 14,000 Palestinians children risk starving to death in the coming hours due to the total Israeli blockade of food, medicines and water.  Thousands of other adults will also die due to famine or Israeli bombing in coming days.

No amount of running old documentaries on Auschwitz or threatening pro-Palestinian protestors will cover up what the UN calls a `war crime.’  Nor will threatening financial hardship on those who protest Israel’s savage repression of Gaza.

So far, Israel’s extreme right-wing government led by Benyamin Netanyahu has rejected all calls to aid the 2.2 million starving or injured Palestinians in the hellhole of Gaza.  His government will eventually bend a little in the face of outrage from France, Canada, the UK, Australia and other western powers.

Meanwhile, Israel has run amok, becoming what Jewish author Arthur Koestler called ‘a nasty little Sparta.’  The slaughter in Gaza would not be happening without the prior connivance of the Biden administration, which fell under the control of the rabid pro-Israel neocons in Washington, and now Israel’s cheerleader, Donald Trump.

But Palestinians will continue to starve or die from US-supplied bombs dropped on refugee camps because Washington keeps blocking real action to halt the mass killing.  Jewish hostages in Gaza have been forgotten.

Interestingly – or shockingly – the rest of the Arab League has only issued little peeps of criticism over the slaughter in Gaza, with the exception of remote, impoverished Yemen, which was heavily bombed by the US and Israel.  President Trump’s visit this week to the obedient Gulf states showed once again how the west has re-colonialized most of the Arab world and brought it to heel.

Meanwhile, Israel and the US keep talking about ‘transfer’ of 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza to someplace else.  For a while in the 1930’s Ethiopia and Kenya featured as key deportation centers for Germany’s Jews.  When National Socialists (aka Nazis, a British propaganda creation) spoke of moving Germany’s Jews to other remote countries, they were scourged as horrid racists by the Brits and Americans.  But today the US and UK are doing something similar with their efforts to expel third worlders and Latinos or move them to Albania, Zimbabwe or Libya.

Israel’s far rightists – ‘Jewish Nazis’ in the words of the late, great Israeli columnist Uri Avnery – aim to kill as many Palestinians as possible to limit their future reproduction.  They are determined to thwart creation of a long-overdue Palestinian state, and seized lands occupied by West Bank Palestinians. These could include much of Lebanon and Syria, and possibly Iraq’s oil producing regions, and even some of Saudi Arabia’s northern territories. 

Many of the one million former Soviet citizens who moved to Israel thanks to US financial help will recall Stalin’s infamous saying, ‘no man, no problem.’  But following in the footsteps of Heinrich Himmler and the Stalinist mass murderers in Ukraine, is ‘worse than a crime’, to paraphrase Talleyrand, a ‘mistake.’ 

Many Israelis want to be rid of the Netanyahu government and end the mass killing of Palestinians.  Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert speaks for them. The western powers should ensure he returns to office.

The post Gaza ‘Worse Than a Crime, a Mistake’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear… If the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—President Harry S. Truman (August 8, 1950)

Let us be very clear.

The Constitution is not a suggestion or a negotiating tactic. It is not optional.

Government officials do not get to pick and choose which laws they will obey.

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land: a binding contract between “we the people” of the United States and those we hire to govern. It spells out our expectations for transparency and accountability, limits the government’s authority, affirms the purpose of government as protecter of liberty and property, and reinforces that we are the masters and government agents are the servants.

Thus, any decision by a government official to suspend the rights enshrined in the Constitution should not be undertaken lightly or for political gain or expedience, nor can it be done without following the strict parameters laid out by its creators and the courts.

Bottom line: any attempt to unilaterally override any aspect of the Constitution should alarm every American, regardless of party affiliation.

Which brings us to the Trump Administration’s ongoing attempts to weaponize concerns about national security in order to wage war on the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

We have been inundated with executive orders issued by President Trump purporting to protect national security interests by gutting free speech, eroding equal rights protections, sidestepping the separation of powers, and pushing us ever closer to martial law and outright dictatorship.

Behind the façade of national security lies a more insidious threat: a permanent shadow government—the Deep State—using every “emergency” to tighten its grip and expand unchecked executive authority.

Trump’s most effective ploy to seize power has been his use of illegal immigration to stoke fear and chill dissent. He has used it as a justification to do away with due process, expand the police state, deepen military involvement in domestic policing, and intimidate the nation into compliance.

Even his bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is just another Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.

This is not about protecting America—it’s about redefining America from the top down.

That redefinition is already underway.

The Trump Administration has floated plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and is considering a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship.”

These proposals are not just absurd—they’re obscene. They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.

This governing by-way-of performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. And it’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.

It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.

We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.

It’s a contradiction: although the Trump Administration is so concerned about falling birth rates that it is prepared to offer financial incentives for childbirth (for example, a $5,000 “baby bonus” and expanded child tax credit), it continues to demonize birthright citizenship for the one population segment that is actually having babies.

Surely the fact that migrant communities, including undocumented immigrants, not only contribute significantly to the economy and pay into Medicare, Social Security and income taxes without any guarantee of anything in return, only adds to their appeal?

Not for Trump, who is spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to expel immigrants who are positively contributing to the U.S. economy, while selectively welcoming others under a vastly different standard—such as family members of a South American drug cartel leader or white Afrikaners—who will have the cost of their resettlement services, and assistance with housing, jobs, and schools paid for by the American taxpayer.

Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.

The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.

Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.

This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The ruling in Wong Kim Ark came during an era of rampant anti-Chinese sentiment, reinforcing that even in times of national xenophobia, the Constitution prevailed in affirming equality under the law.

The Court’s ruling was unequivocal: the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship to all born on American soil, regardless of parentage.

That precedent still stands.

Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.

Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.

After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.

If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.

Likewise, this is not a return to “originalism.” It’s a retreat from constitutional rule altogether. It suggests that citizenship is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, but a privilege bestowed by those in power.

That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.

The notion that a sitting president can erase a constitutional guarantee with the stroke of a pen is not only absurd—it is dangerous. Such an action would be flatly unconstitutional, lacking any legal authority and in direct contradiction to more than a century of settled law.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.

Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.

You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the role of the judiciary as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.

If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.

As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Revoking birthright citizenship would create a stateless class of people born on U.S. soil who are denied recognition by their own country. These children would be cast into legal limbo, denied the rights and protections afforded to every other citizen.

Such a move would not only be cruel—it would be profoundly un-American.

Don’t be fooled: the same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship—based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.

This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.

And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.

Increasingly, the government is creating a hierarchy of so-called “deserving” citizens, where access to constitutional rights is predicated on compliance, productivity, and perceived loyalty to the state. This shift toward merit-based citizenship is in direct contradiction to the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence, which affirms that rights are inalienable, not contingent.

We see it in efforts to strip dissenters of their legal protections, deny free speech to the unpopular, surveil certain communities more than others, and criminalize poverty, protest, or association with disfavored political movements.

In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, your allegiance, and your compliance.

Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.

We have seen this before.

History shows how easily rights can be suspended when fear rules and power goes unchecked.

Consider the use of emergency powers to suspend habeas corpus protections, the unilateral authorization of surveillance programs that violate the Fourth Amendment, and the declaration of national emergencies to justify military deployments or detentions without trial.

These are not hypothetical scenarios.

They have occurred under multiple administrations and show how executive power, once unrestrained, expands at the expense of individual rights.

Redefining who qualifies as an American citizen is not the end of the story—it is the beginning of a slippery slope.

If the government can deny citizenship to those born on U.S. soil, what is to stop it from stripping citizenship from naturalized citizens? Or from declaring certain classes of people—based on ideology, ethnicity, or ancestry—as unworthy of constitutional protection?

What’s at stake is not merely a policy dispute—it is the foundational principle that rights cannot be granted or revoked at the pleasure of a single ruler.

If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.

These power grabs rarely come without a manufactured crisis.

That’s how the Deep State operates: inflame the public, declare an emergency, and then consolidate control.

Every time the people are told to trade liberty for security, we lose both.

This is a line that must not be crossed.

Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.

This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals—not just the popular or the powerful.

Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic—but an empire of arbitrary rule.

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

The post They’re Coming for Your Birthright: Citizenship as Spectacle, Transaction, or Privilege appeared first on LewRockwell.

Traditional, orthodox Roman Catholic believers ought to be extremely grateful that American Catholics do not vote on Catholic doctrine, moral teaching, and ecclesiology. Because if they did, and if they got their way, much of the historic Roman Catholic Church would be swept away into the dustbin of history. This conclusion screams from the pages of a recent Pew Research Center survey report, “Most U.S. Catholics Say They Want the Church To Be ‘More Inclusive.’” Pew conducted the survey from February 3 through 9 with “1,787 Catholic respondents.”

Few of us would be surprised by one of the report’s major findings, namely that “there are large divides between Catholics who attend Mass weekly and those who don’t.” That is, the latter are astronomically more liberal. Nor would we be surprised that Catholic Democrats are far more liberal than Republican ones (Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi versus J.D. Vance, anyone?).

Some might not have expected that Catholic women are more liberal than Catholic men, though this sex difference is something we see in national politics as well. Here, women were more progressive in the following areas: whether the Church should be more “inclusive,” the use of birth control, blessings for same-sex couples (66 percent, versus 54 percent for men), marriage for same-sex couples (55 percent, versus 45 percent for men), and allowing women to be deacons.

Unfortunately, Pew did not explore the impact of marital status on women’s stances. My guess is that this would show that marital status, along with having or not having children, would matter a lot—with married women, especially those with children, being more conservative, as they are politically. We can infer this by the above-mentioned finding regarding the doctrinal differences between Catholic Democrats and Republicans, since single women are far more likely to vote Democrat.

Age mattered, but in surprising ways. Respondents who were 18 to 34 were often more conservative, in some cases by very hefty margins, than those ages 65 and older. This was true on the ordination of women as priests and deacons, whether priests should be allowed to marry, Communion for cohabiting Catholics, the use of IVF, and wanting the Church to be more “inclusive.” (I ignored findings where differences were only a few or less percentage points.)

I could only find one area where younger respondents were more liberal to any significant degree, but it was an important one. Those 18 to 34 were more likely than those 65 and older to support marriage for same-sex couples (55 versus 49 percent).

Hispanics were more conservative than white non-Hispanics in some areas. These included whether the Church should be more inclusive, the use of IVF, Communion of the cohabiting, allowing women to be deacons or priests, and allowing priests to marry.

As for trends over time, some Pew findings showed only slight changes between 2013, 2014 or 2015, and now. One exception was support for using birth control, which rose from 76 to 84 percent between 2013 and 2025, a shift of eight percent. Even this is not an astronomical change, though the percentage here is hitting close to a ceiling. Another was support for giving Communion to cohabiting Catholics, which rose from 61 percent to a whopping 76 percent between 2015 and 2025, a 15-point shift.

But by far the biggest demographic finding of this report had to do with the differences between Catholics who attend Mass weekly or more and those who do not. This would be better news for observant Catholics if not for other facts. First, as Pew also reported in 2024, only 29 percent of U.S. Catholics attend Mass at least weekly. This is less than a third. Second, Catholics who do go to church as least weekly are still pretty darn progressive about many major Church teachings. Allow me to detail just how liberal weekly church attending Catholics really are, again noting that they are clearly much more conservative than Catholics who attend church less often.

Over 70 percent of weekly church attenders support Catholics using birth control or IVF. Fifty-nine percent are OK with cohabiting people receiving Communion. Another 54 percent want female deacons. Forty-nine percent believe that the Catholic Church should allow priests to get married, versus 48 percent opposing this. This is a fifty-fifty split.

Even where the majority of weekly church attenders do not take more progressive positions vis-à-vis Church teaching, the percentages in favor of the latter are still pretty hefty. Forty-six percent want priests to bless same-sex unions (almost half of weekly church attenders want the Church to bless sin?), while 31 percent want full Church recognition of the same. Forty-one percent want female priests (priestesses?).

One interesting survey item mentioned above asked if the Church should “be more inclusive, even if that means changing some of its teachings,” versus saying that it should “stick to its traditional teachings, even if that means the church gets smaller.” Forty-two percent of weekly church attenders chose the former option (compared to 58 percent who attend only once or twice a month and 69 percent of those who attend church even less often).

Read the Whole Article

The post Liberalism in the Pews appeared first on LewRockwell.

Perhaps Putin should tell the Russian people and the Russian Army that his interest in resolving the conflict in Ukraine with peace negotiations lies in the possibility that the negotiations could be used to achieve a Great Power Agreement like what he and Lavrov tried to achieve with the West during the winter of 2021-2022 prior to Russia’s forced intervention in Ukraine. A New Yalta in effect.  

Russian foreign affairs commentators have been speaking for some time about the need for a new Yalta agreement.  A few years ago I was asked to address the Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject.  I told them something that they did not want to hear:  that Washington’s claim to hegemony prevented accommodation to Russian sovereignty.

A few thinking people have been perplexed at Putin’s conduct of the conflict in Ukraine. Russia could have ended the war quickly with conquest, but  instead has fought a slow, restrained war that has greatly expanded the war with Putin and Lavrov bleating constantly for “peace negotiations.”

Why has Putin done this despite the protests of the Wagner Group and the Chechnya leader of the Muslim troops fighting in the Ukraine conflict?  The only answer seems to be that he wants a New Yalta Agreement.  If he wins the war, he loses the opportunity. So he drags out the war in the hopes that negotiations will provide a platform for addressing the “root cause of the conflict”–which he sees as the absence of a Great Power Agreement.

One problem Putin’s wishful strategy faces is Washington’s commitment to hegemony.  No American president has repudiated the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Another is that the absence of victory goes down poorly with the Russian nationalists and with the troops themselves.  There are news reports that Russians are suspicious  and resentful of peace negotiations in Ukraine that stop short of victory. 

Russian soldiers doing the fighting have told media that as tired as they are and as much as they want to go home, they want to liberate all of the regions that are once again part of Russia so that they don’t have to renew the fight in the future.  As one of the soldiers asked, “Otherwise, have all the guys died in vain?”

Russia’s rescue of the Russian territories assigned to Ukraine by Soviet leaders is important to Putin, but more important is to secure a Great Power Agreement, a New Yalta, that accepts Russia as a member county free of sanctions, overthrow attempts, and conflicts.

Putin is so desirous of this agreement that he has risked the ever-widening of the Ukraine conflict to the point that drone attacks now close all Moscow airports and destroy energy infrastructure deep inside Russia.  When Putin says that peace negotiations must address the “root cause of the conflict,” he means the absence of a Great Power Agreement.  

Putin is not interested in a negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine.  He is hopeful of using negotiation to achieve a New Yalta.  The problem that Putin faces is that Washington, wrapped up as it is in its assumed hegemony, has no comprehension of another country’s point of view. 

Washington’s approach to all negotiations is to use threats, to look for levers of pressure to force other governments to accept Washington’s “solution” to the “problem,” usually a Washington creation.  In other words, Washington doesn’t really negotiate.  It imposes its solutions.

Trump expects the Ukrainian negotiations to fail, and has ensured as much, in order to be able to withdraw money and focus from Ukraine and use the resources to bring into operation Trump’s goal of an American Middle East colonial empire which began with Trump’s claim of Gaza as an American possession. This claim is a claim to the undersea gas reserves that run from Gaza’s border with Egypt to northern Syria.  Trump’s visit in Saudi Arabia, the last remaining Arab state, was to enlist the rulers as junior partners in Trump’s American Middle East colonial empire. It seems that with Trump’s domestic agenda blocked by the judiciary, Trump will make us great again with the rise of America’s Middle East Empire.

The post How America Is Being Made Great Again appeared first on LewRockwell.

Dr. Mark Thornton ‪@misesmedia‬ discusses the economic implications of the historically high gold-silver ratio, suggesting it may signal an impending recession. He explains that central bank gold purchases are driving its price higher relative to silver, reflecting deeper market imbalances. Dr. Thornton emphasizes the importance of historical data and Austrian economic principles in forecasting and understanding crises. He warns that the U.S. national debt and current monetary policies could lead to hyperinflation and require drastic interest rate cuts. Lastly, he stresses the need for practical financial education, as government responses are failing to address core economic problems, leaving markets vulnerable to heightened volatility.

Comments open on YouTube

The post Gold/Silver Ratio Signaling Rapid Reversal & Recession Coming appeared first on LewRockwell.

America – the greatest nation on earth – is currently facing unprecedented times of social unrest, and dare I say, this is just the beginning.

Regardless of who presides over the nation, we should always be aware of the so-called “shadow government” and their agenda. And mark my words: Our nation is in for times of massive unrest that were being plotted as early as 2015 and will continue until the “global agenda” pursued by George Soros and his allies is implemented.  The coming out-of-control riots may lead to a call for Martial Law, as I will explain.

America has been preparing for massive social uprisings for a very long time (a quick research on the topic will reveal this truth). What I am about to tell you next might come as a surprise for some of you, but most of the things that we experience are being manufactured.

1. The leaked U.S. Army Military Police training manual for “Civil Disturbance Operations” outlines how military assets will be utilized domestically to quell riots, confiscate firearms, and even kill American on U.S. soil if need if need be during mass civil unrest.
2. Department of Defense launched the Minerva Research Initiative – an integral program that aims to analyze and predict social behavior by authorizing “Intelligent Networks” to snoop on every citizen’s private social media interaction. The Pentagon’s secret pre-crime program to know your thoughts and predict your future. Be careful what you are sharing or saying on social media platforms.
3. 2015: Jade Helm 15 – Realistic Military Training (RMT) was a joint realistic military and inter-agency unconventional warfare exercise. This has been the first-ever military exercise held on federal soil to prepare our troops and law enforcers in case of invasions or uncontrolled civil uprisings. A quick look over the map of the exercise might lead us to the idea that “the federal government is intentionally practicing war against its own states” (Knowles, 2015).
4. The latest massive social uprising America has faced for more than more years in a row is another fabricated movement. It is being claimed that once again Soros is the mastermind behind the demonstrations.

Never in my lifetime have I seen America so divided.

Our politicians and the mainstream media have been endlessly pitting various groups against one another for years, and everywhere you look, hearts are growing very cold. And this is when the “fun” begins. Trump’s victory has come as a surprise for many, but if we consider the new state of play of the world, where the economic crisis has led to global divisions driving, thus, a return to national interests over the global ones, voting for Trump has been the obvious choice.

During difficult times, we must safeguard the values and interests of the American people. But manufacturing nation-wide protests during confusing times may be just what some might wish for in order to divide and destabilize the country in exchange for the ability to control us at all the times. In case we don’t comply with their “desires” we will face dire consequences, as the infamous Zbigniew Brzezinski, the imperialist/globalist/war-monger and former policy advisor to Obama, said: “Today, it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people”.

After some extensive research on the matter, I am inclined to affirm that what we’re currently experiencing is just the beginning, and the protests are rapidly turning into violent riots. Although many commentators are claiming that martial law will not be declared, we can never be sure of what is being planned for us.

Eliminate Your Right to a Speedy Trial

Even in Martial Law, you will be tried for crimes. Now, what you consider to be a CRIME might change drastically, however you will be tried. You will not be tried by a jury of your peers. Instead, the military will become judge, jury, and jailor.

As scary as that sounds you will still have a trial to decide your fate. This is not a guarantee but there is legal precedent that your 6th Amendment will be upheld. While President Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus during the Civil war, Lambdon P. Milligan fought his military tribunal sentencing and the Supreme court ruled in his favor.

In 1866 the Supreme court ruled there could be no military trials for US citizens.

So, here’s a glimpse of how life will be when martial law comes into effect:

• Everything we own can become federal property (especially guns and food stockpiles, which will be the first to be confiscated).
• Curfews will be the new normal, while groups of armed men and women will patrol the streets at all times.
• Access to food, water and other resources will be rationed. If your life depends on a daily dose of medication, you should start storing it in advance.
• There will be sky-high inflation, and with a national debt of almost $20 trillion, the stage is set to sky-rocket a new financial crisis that will make the 1930s Depression look like a walk in the park.
• Everyone will be considered suspicious. A short chit-chat with your neighbor about the “wrong” things can put your life on the line.
• There will be no access to free Internet, while free press and the freedom of speech will be things of the past

The 6 Golden Rules of Surviving Martial Law

Prepper or no prepper, these are the 6 Golden Rules to follow if martial law comes to your town:

1. First and foremost, talk with no one and trust no one.

Although the clear majority of preppers are already set to outlast any scenario that cuts them off from all the common supply lines, we must remember that under martial Law, everything that we own is able to become government property. Therefore, do not tell people about your supplies or secret hide-outs. I know it’s hard not to brag about your preps, but be careful to whom you’re talking

2. Always renew your supplies and make sure you have a “basic martial law survival kit.”

A basic martial law survival kit would imply the following: electricity generator, water filters or even water generators (H2O Dynamo), weapons, food supplies for six months, first aid supplies, clothing for any type of weather, a flashlight, batteries, radio gear, and navigation equipment. Of course, you’ll need these if you want to stay put. If you want to go outside and face the music…that’s a different story.

3. Avoid getting in the way of law enforcement or the military.

Even though some would advise that we be resilient to any violations of your constitutional rights, which, by the way, will be justified under martial law, the best survival tactics are to keep your cool and think before you react. You can always choose to fight back. These two options – bugging in or bugging out – will cause you to probably face the hardest decision of your life.

4. Tune in and be up to date with the news.

It is crucial to stay informed and keep in touch with whomever you consider important. Every media outlet, as well as the Internet, will be controlled by the federal government, and you will not have access to any other information except what is being communicated by the state. Although this might be upsetting, you still need to know what is going to happen so you can be prepared for any situation.

5. Cautiously develop a survival network.

Establishing a survival network would be an excellent idea considering the fact that we can never know for how long martial law will be imposed. Consequently, setting up a diverse group of preppers will ensure your long-term survival. But make sure you keep a low profile so that you and your group will not be targeted as perpetrators.

6. Inspect and know your surroundings by heart.

You should be able to visualize your home turf even in your sleep. Ideally, you would also have a safe room. Make sure you have a blueprint of your area where you mark the closest escape routes, develop the quickest itinerary to a safe haven, and formulate the best and safest evacuation strategy.

Nationwide Martial Law

Despite the fantasy of a nationwide Martial Law, the resources do not exist to lockdown every American city. In fact, we couldn’t lockdown the major cities all at the same time. We are talking about tens of millions of people.

However, we could very well see sections of Boston, NYC, and Detroit, among others, face a Martial Law type presence.

I hope you have connected the dots while reading this article. Many of these “Emergency Acts” that have been enacted at the state and federal level have already stolen your liberty in writing. The government has built a framework for Martial Law and in some cities the violence has already started. Not to mention we have willingly walked into a world of censorship.

Pay close attention to positioning. The American military is great at positioning and I have to believe that much of what is happening in our nation is about positioning resource to cut down civil unrest due to this lockdown and, God forbid, successional lockdowns to come.

The fact is, we have given up tremendous amounts of power. Those who rule over us are fully prepared to send in the shock troops, if need be. It is time for America to be smart and get people back to work, safely. It’s time to isolate at risk populations.

Otherwise we will see Martial Law in cities across this nation and now you know what we stand to lose.

This article was originally published on MadgeWaggy.blogspot.com.

The post Millions Will Leave the U.S. To Survive When Martial Law Will Be Declared appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hawaiian Governor Josh Green is scheduled to serve as minority witness for Democrat members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

The Committee is holding a hearing today titled The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines.

My brother and his family have lived on Maui for 25 years, and I have lived on the island for a total of three years. During the years 2020-2023, I frequently spoke with my brother and other island residents, including Ed Dowd, about the COVID-19 situation on the island.

I first became interested in the background and profile of Hawaiian Governor Josh Green when Lahaina was incinerated on August 8, 2023. The disaster—about which I have been researching a book for the last two years—was emblematic of catastrophic mismanagement in terms of both prevention and emergency response.

An eerily similar fire struck Lahaina in on August 24, 2018 that came very close to penetrating the old town center. A review of the incident yielded an action list of measures that needed to be done to prevent total disaster from striking the historic town in the future. Of critical importance were bolstering power lines and poles and clearing desiccated vegetation from the hillside about Lahaina. None of these measures were taken.

Josh Green was elected lieutenant governor of Hawaii in November 2018 and was serving in this office during the COVID-19 pandemic. His previous career as a family doctor and ER physician at rural hospitals on the Big Island made him an obvious candidate to lead the state’s COVID-19 pandemic response.

Lt. Governor Green’s response was typical of Democrat Party administered states in its vigorous advocacy of lockdowns and masking, and equally rigorous suppression of early treatment modalities.

Especially stupid was his decision to close Hawaii’s beaches, which were certainly the best place for people to be—getting lots of sunshine and fresh air—after the virus began circulating in the islands.

The Hawaiian islands have a resident population of 1,455,274. The largest urban centers are Honolulu, with a resident population of 337,338. Outside of Honolulu, most of Hawaii’s residents live in relatively small towns and suburbs.

The lieutenant governor was widely praised in the media for his quick decision to close nonessential travel to the islands, which achieved nothing apart from demolishing the local economy.

In spite of travel restrictions, the contagion still—by official accounts—arrived in the islands around March 17, 2020.

The COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Hawaii began with great fanfare on December 15, 2020, with healthcare workers at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu receiving the first shots that prevented neither infection nor transmission.

With Lt. Governor Green and the local media erroneously proclaiming that vaccination would stop the spread and allow the state to go back to normal, the vaccine was rolled out out in two phases.

The first phase—rolled out in the winter and spring of 2021— was for healthcare workers and other cohorts deemed at higher risk of grave illness. The second phase—rolled out in the summer of 2021—was for all other persons 16 years and older.

Despite widespread vaccine coverage by the autumn of 2021, by far the biggest spike of hospitalizations and deaths in the islands occurred in December 2021.

An informal survey of my brother’s large circle of friends revealed that most of those who’d gotten vaccinated nevertheless fell ill during the winter of 2021-22 spike. Within his own family on the island, the one adult who received the shot was the first to fall ill and also suffered the most severe symptoms.

Since he was elected Governor of Hawaii, Josh Green has frequently proclaimed his commitment to “green” or “renewable” energy—as though reducing the “carbon footprint” of the islands’ 1.4 million inhabitants is going to affect the climate of planet earth.

Note that the Hawaiian islands feature some of the most active volcanoes on earth—Kīlauea, Maunaloa, Maunakea, Hualālai, and Kohala—which release thousands of tons per day of water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), and sulfur dioxide (SO2). During a major eruption, Kīlauea emits between 30,000–40,000 tons per day of these gasses.

It requires a special kind of dedicated obtuseness and ideological intoxication to claim that humans living on active volcanic islands need to erect windmills and drive electric cars to reduce their CO2 emissions.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, Minority Witness appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Trump administration is a revolutionary, transformative presidency. It seeks to restore the American republic to its original constitutional status as the guardian of rights and liberties by forcefully challenging the despotic tyranny and regimentation of the governing elites composing the regulatory captured bureaucratic administrative state and its corrupt crony enablers, particularly in Big Pharma, the warmongers of the military industrial complex, and the invasive surveillance/intelligence deep state at the core of this infamy. Along with Vice President J. D, Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice Harmeet Dillion fully understands her crucial role in confronting and eviscerating the deep state and its institutional actors and covert appendages. This long-standing, pervasive, insidious corruption demands the commanding attention she is providing in rooting it out root and branch.

The National Security Deep State, driven by the imperial presidency, an acquiescent congress and a complacent federal judiciary, has destroyed the American Republic. Their egregious welfare-warfare state, enabled by the Fed, fosters and promotes the profligacy and dependency which is at the root of this destructive process. Because of its clandestine nature and covert linkages to organized crime syndicates worldwide, ruthlessness, assassinations, regime change, drug and human trafficking, extortion and racketeering, money laundering, cyber-crime, and corruption are not aberrations or breakdowns of the deep state, but absolutely endemic to it.

The post Tucker Carlson – Harmeet Dhillon’s War on the Discrimination Against White Christians and DOJ Corruption appeared first on LewRockwell.

Jesse Trentadue wrote:

We may have hit critical mass.  This appeared on the internet this morning out of nowhere.

The post The Forgotten Victim of the OKC Bombing? The Shocking Death of Kenneth Trentadue appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Guardian

The post If you were shocked by my film on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, you haven’t been paying attention appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The post Videos of malnourished children show Gaza’s forced starvation crisis appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Bloomberg

The post US-China Tensions Over Chips Risk Hurting Trade Truce, Dialogue appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

What’s really interesting here is how much important U.S. foreign policy news there is in it that seems to be almost completely blacked out from the U.S. news media, whether one follows the liberal mainstream or their conservative counterparts.  And to add my further analysis to what these astute observers have to say, what strikes me about Trump’s foreign policy is, rhetoric aside, how consistent it is with that of all his predecessors, Democratic or Republican.  It’s still “Bombs and Propaganda,” whether we’re dropping them or someone else is dropping our bombs.  Bombs and Propaganda. See also this.

The post Phone Call Fallout; What’s Up With Trump? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Reason

The post Military tests gave radiation poisoning to San Franciscans appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Haaretz.com

The post On Israeli TV, Starving Gazan Babies Aren’t a Problem. As Long as There Are No Photos of Them appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The post “Special report: Gaza’s children starve as Israel withholds all food supplies appeared first on LewRockwell.